The week at Retraction Watch featured a marriage proposal tucked into a paper’s acknowledgements section, the retraction of a controversial Science advice column, and The New York Times pushing for more focus and funding on research misconduct. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Honorary authorship demands, fetishizing metrics, does media attention drive research agenda?
Author: Ivan Oransky
Weekend reads: Gay canvassing study saga continues; Elsevier policy sparks concern; a string of scandals
As might have been expected, continuing developments in the Michael LaCour gay canvassing study retraction have drowned out coverage of stories that ordinarily might capture a lot of attention, such as fake case reports making their way into CDC data. A sampling:
- Berkeley graduate student David Broockman, one of the people whose critique brought down the study, “was consistently told by friends and advisers to keep quiet about his concerns lest he earn a reputation as a troublemaker, or — perhaps worse — someone who merely replicates and investigates others’ research rather than plant a flag of his own.” A chilling quote from New York Magazine’s Jesse Singal’s devastating tick-tock of the case.
- The New York Times got the first interview with LaCour.
- There are a lot of questions about another of LaCour’s studies, according to BuzzFeed’s Virginia Hughes.
- Ivan went on PBS NewsHour to discuss the case.
But just like last week, there was plenty happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Gay canvassing study saga continues; Elsevier policy sparks concern; a string of scandals
Data “were destroyed due to privacy/confidentiality requirements,” says co-author of retracted gay canvassing study
As promised, Michael LaCour, the co-author of the now-retracted Science paper on gay canvassing, has posted a detailed response to the allegations against him.
In the 23-page document — available here — LaCour claims to
introduce evidence uncovering discrepancies between the timeline of events presented in Broockman et al. (2015) and the actual timeline of events and disclosure.
He also says that the graduate students who critiqued his work failed to follow the correct sampling procedure and chose an incorrect variable in what LaCour calls “a curious and possibly intentional ‘error.'” He writes: Continue reading Data “were destroyed due to privacy/confidentiality requirements,” says co-author of retracted gay canvassing study
Should the chocolate-diet sting study be retracted? And why the coverage doesn’t surprise a news watchdog
Note: This story has been updated to include the journal’s response. See below.
Yesterday, John Bohannon described in i09.com how he successfully”created” health news — he conducted a flawed trial of the health benefits of chocolate, gamed the data to produce statistically significant results, and published the findings in the International Archives of Medicine:
It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.
Given that the author himself says the study is meaningless, clearly, the journal will retract it, yes? Continue reading Should the chocolate-diet sting study be retracted? And why the coverage doesn’t surprise a news watchdog
Weekend reads, part 2: Oldest-ever PhD; most embarrassing citation ever; blame the antibodies?
As we noted Saturday, there was so much happening around the web last week that it made sense to break up Weekend Reads, especially since this is a holiday weekend in the U.S. and elsewhere. Here’s part 2: Continue reading Weekend reads, part 2: Oldest-ever PhD; most embarrassing citation ever; blame the antibodies?
Weekend reads: Gay canvassing study redux; editors fired; how the world’s biggest faker was caught
This week at Retraction Watch was dominated by the Science same-sex marriage study, after we broke the news Wednesday morning that one of its authors had requested its retraction. (And crashed our servers in the process.) So the first section of this Weekend Reads will focus on pieces following up on that story:
- The New Republic’s Naomi Shavin told the story of how we broke the story, and how the study fell apart.
- Jesse Singal of New York Magazine interviewed Donald Green, the co-author who asked for the retraction.
- Ivan spoke to NPR’s On The Media about the study, and what the story says about peer review.
- “”The incentives to publish today are corrupting the scientific literature and the media that covers it.” We wrote a New York Times op-ed for today’s paper, “What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?“
But there was plenty more happening this week: Continue reading Weekend reads: Gay canvassing study redux; editors fired; how the world’s biggest faker was caught
What should an ideal retraction notice look like?
Have you seen our “unhelpful retraction notices” category, a motley collection of vague, misleading, and even information-free entries? We’d like to make it obsolete, and we need our readers’ help.
Here’s what we mean: Next month, Ivan will be traveling to Rio to take part in the World Conference on Research Integrity. One of his presentations is a set of proposed guidelines for retraction notices and their dissemination that we hope will inform publishing practices and severely limit the number of entries in our “unhelpful retraction notices” category. In September, for example, we announced that our guidelines would be linked from PRE-val, which “verifies for the end user that content has gone through the peer review process and provides information that is vital to assessing the quality of that process.”
Here’s a draft of our proposed guidelines, which include many of the items recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Continue reading What should an ideal retraction notice look like?
JAMA vitamin-hip fracture study earns Expression of Concern for integrity issues
JAMA has issued an Expression of Concern about a 2005 study of whether two different types of vitamin B could prevent broken hips in people who’d suffered strokes.
In this Japanese population with a high baseline fracture risk, combined treatment with folate and vitamin B12 is safe and effective in reducing the risk of a hip fracture in elderly patients following stroke.
Here’s the notice for the study, “Effect of folate and mecobalamin on hip fractures in patients with stroke: a randomized controlled trial:” Continue reading JAMA vitamin-hip fracture study earns Expression of Concern for integrity issues
Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked
In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.
[3:45 p.m. Eastern, 5/28/15: Please see an update on this story; the study has been retracted.]
Donald Green, of Columbia, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, published the paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” in December 2014. The study received widespread media attention, including from This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost, as LaCour’s site notes.
David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, were two of the people impressed with the work, so they planned an extension of it, as they explain in a timeline posted online yesterday: Continue reading Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked
“Super-surgeon” Macchiarini guilty of misconduct, external review finds
Paolo Macchiarini, the celebrated surgeon whose work has come under scrutiny in Italy and at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, committed misconduct in six papers, according to an external reviewer.
Macchiarini is best known for creating tracheas from cadavers and patients’ own stem cells. The findings of the external review, first reported yesterday by SvD Nyheter, were made public last week. They are only available in Swedish thus far, and we have requested a copy from the Karolinska.
External reviewer Bengt Gerdin, of Uppsala University, summarized his findings this way for Retraction WAtch: Continue reading “Super-surgeon” Macchiarini guilty of misconduct, external review finds