Researchers who flagged methodological issues in a paper on birdsong a year and a half before Nature retracted it say they should be credited in the editorial notice. But the editors have refused, with one telling the critics the paper was retracted for unrelated reasons.
The March 2024 study at the center of the dispute looked at how sexual selection may drive song patterns in male zebra finches. Nature retracted the paper last month because two of the synthetic song pairs used in the study were found to be unreliable, according to the notice. All three authors agreed to the retraction.
Todd Roberts, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch the critics now asking for credit “prompted us to check the synthetic song pairs used in our paper.” He said his team did not do the reliability analysis of the pairs until after publication.
“We would have designed song pairs differently had we known,” Roberts, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said. “I want our published work to be as accurate and well validated as possible, and we felt that these results alone were no longer strong enough. These concerns and our interest in preserving the scientific record led us to retract the paper.”
The critics, Martin Bulla, an evolutionary ornithologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, and two colleagues, Remya Sankar and Wolfgang Forstmeier, submitted their concerns to Nature for consideration as a Matters Arising postpublication comment in August 2024. It has since been rejected.
Writing that the paper failed to “account for random noise in small datasets,” Bulla, Sankar and Forstmeier concluded in the comment the “findings are undermined by statistical artefacts, low metric repeatability, and poor experimental design.” They calculated that one of the song pairs used in the study was reliable only 59% of the time, and another only 79%, they told us. The retraction notice states the paper was retracted because, following additional analysis by the authors, the same song pairs were determined to be reliable only 35% and 75% of the time.
Bulla’s group wasn’t the first to flag issues with the paper. Kate Snyder and Nicole Creanza of Vanderbilt University, who wrote a “News & Views” commentary published alongside the article, told us in a statement they thought one key aspect of the methodology the study used “should not be repeated in subsequent work, and we wanted readers to understand why.” They also pointed to inaccuracies produced in the data.
But Bulla said his team deserves explicit credit for the retraction. After seeing the retraction, Bulla requested the journal credit them in the notice. Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature, responded by telling him the retraction was due to “[s]omething else entirely,” according to emails we have seen.
Gee also told Bulla what he was asking for would “not be possible” without a “complete redraft of the retraction notice; a re-review by our Research Integrity Group; the agreement of the authors of the retraction; and perhaps most importantly the input of referees who would need to judge whether the statements in your Matters Arising agree with the reasons given for the retraction.”
“These things are now simply not practical,” Gee said. He did not respond to our request for comment, and a spokesperson for Nature confirmed the submission from Bulla, Sankar and Forstmeier will not be published as a Matters Arising comment after two rounds of peer review. The reviews, which we have seen, indicate the referees saw merit in some of the critics’ points but had reservations about others.
Bulla told us he and his colleagues felt the journal’s justifications for excluding them from the retraction notice were “entirely contradictory.”
“Our view is that this constitutes bibliographic erasure,” Bulla said of the editorial decision not to mention his team in the review or publish their commentary. “The journal chose administrative convenience over an accurate scientific record, effectively burying the independent labour that forced the retraction.”
In recent years many journals have begun crediting sleuths in notices for their “thankless” work. Some publishers let those who uncover errors decide whether they receive public credit, and many choose to remain anonymous.
A Nature podcast episode and the News and Views commentary highlighted the paper’s findings in 2024. The spokesperson for Nature said those publications are editorially independent from the journal. Updates to the two features now alert site visitors to the retraction.
Snyder and Creanza told us they decided not to retract their 2024 commentary on the work because they believed it “contained important methodological context that remained useful,” including cautions about the analytic approaches the study had used. “In our opinion,” they wrote, “the retraction should have noted broader methodological concerns with the paper, not just an issue with these song pairs.”
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