Earlier this month, we reported on how Susanne Stoll, a graduate student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University College London, discovered an error that toppled a highly-cited 2014 article — and which might affect hundreds of other papers in the field of perception.
We spoke with Stoll about the experience.
Retraction Watch (RW): What did it feel like to find such a significant error? Did you doubt yourself at first, and, if so when did you realize you’d found something both real and important?
Bowing to legal pressure from the supplement maker Herbalife, Elsevier earlier this year retracted — and then removed — a paper which claimed that a young woman in India died of liver failure after using the company’s products. The move has led to more legal threats.
The group, led by Cyriac Abby Philips, of Cochin Gastroenterology, in Kerala, India, asserted that tests of Herbalife products similar to those the woman had been taking revealed the presence of heavy metals, bacteria and, in most samples, “undisclosed toxic compounds including traces of psychotropic recreational agent.”
A pharmacologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who lost a highly cited 2014 paper in Nature for questions about the integrity of her data has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — and UT Southwestern has rescinded two professorships she previously held.
A sports medicine journal has retracted a widely circulated 2019 meta-analysis which purported to find that interval training was the “magic bullet” for weight loss, after the analysis proved to be riddled with holes.
Steele has some cred when it comes to research integrity, and part of that cred comes from another retraction. He was part of a team of data sleuths who have called for the retraction of seven papers by Matheus Barbalho, a Brazilian exercise scientist.
A veterinary researcher at the University of Maryland has lost seven papers for problematic images and other issues, bringing his retraction total to 13.
Some of those questions were raised — first, it seems — by Elisabeth Bik, who in November 2015 reported her concerns to PLOS ONE about a different one of Samal’s articles, which she also flagged on PubPeer.
The journal is now retracting that article, titled “Evaluation of the replication, pathogenicity, and immunogenicity of Avian Paramyxovirus (APMV) serotypes 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 in Rhesus macaques.” According to the retraction notice:
More than six months after two of the world’s leading medical journals retracted papers on COVID-19 based on suspect data from a questionable company, a journal says it has cleared a raft of articles by the controversial founder of the firm. Or, has it?
Vascular, a SAGE title, says it has investigated all papers in the journal by Sapan Desai that relied on “a significant amount of data,” whatever that means. Desai, you’ll recall, founded Surgisphere, which is now famous for refusing to share its data in articles published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.
We counted 18 11 papers in Vascular on which Desai was a co-author. The journal says — in a rather oblique way — that all but two of the articles it examined either checked out or didn’t include enough data to raise alarms.
A research technician at Washington State University resigned after his colleagues caught him fabricating data earlier this year, Retraction Watch has learned.
Ryan Evanoff was working in veterinary microbiology at the Pullman campus when members of the department discovered that he had been falsifying sequencing data in gene studies. According to Robert Mealey, the chair of the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State:
Don’t tell the aquatic beetles in the family Grouvellinus Champion 1923, but their number just got a little smaller. Officially speaking, that is. Unofficially, keep that place setting at the holiday table. Well, don’t, if you’re under travel restrictions for COVID-19. You get the picture.
A journal has retracted a 2019 paper describing the discovery of a new member of the family, part of a “citizen science” (or “taxon expedition”) effort to collect samples of the insects in the remote Maliau Basin of Borneo, over a bureaucratic dispute.
A legal scholar with a peripatetic and checkered career — and questionable CV — now has 23 retractions by our count.
Dimitris Liakopoulos, about whom we first wrote in July, has claimed to have held professorships in Europe and the United States, including at Columbia Law School, Stetson University and Tufts University, as well as authorship on some 600 papers. But journals have been retracting his articles over concerns about plagiarism and concerns about his stated academic affiliations. For example, Tufts told us in July that he had never been affiliated with the school.
Liakopoulos appears to have locked his ORCID ID, making public scrutiny of his scholarly output more difficult. But commenters on PubPeer have taken aim at several of his papers over the past few months.
A team of researchers in England has retracted a 2014 paper after a graduate student affiliated with the group found a fatal error while trying to replicate parts of the work — and which might affect similar studies by other scientists, as well.
The article, “Perceptual load affects spatial tuning of neuronal populations in human early visual cortex,” was written by Benjamin de Haas, then of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London, and his colleagues at UCL.
