Author: Ivan Oransky

Caught Our Notice: JAMA warns readers about all of Brian Wansink’s papers in its journals

Titles:

    1. First Foods Most: After 18-Hour Fast, People Drawn to Starches First and Vegetables Last
    2. Fattening Fasting: Hungry Grocery Shoppers Buy More Calories, Not More Food
    3. Watch What You Eat: Action-Related Television Content Increases Food Intake
    4. Super Bowls: serving bowl size and food consumption
    5. Consequences of belonging to the “clean plate club”
    6. Preordering school lunch encourages better food choices by children
Brian Wansink

What Caught Our Attention: Brian Wansink, the beleaguered food marketing researcher at Cornell University, has already earned a retraction — two, if you count the fact that a retracted and replaced article was then retracted — and a correction from JAMA journals. Today, JAMA and two of its journals issued Expressions of Concern for six articles by Wansink and colleagues — all of those by him that have not yet been retracted. One of those paper has been cited more than 100 times. Continue reading Caught Our Notice: JAMA warns readers about all of Brian Wansink’s papers in its journals

Weekend reads: Brazen plagiarism; why animal studies don’t hold up in humans; motherhood citation penalty

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, would you consider a tax-deductible donation of $25, or a recurring donation of an amount of your choosing, to support it? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured the delisting of more than a dozen journals from one publisher, all at once; an odd correction in a journal unrelated to where the original work was published; and a look at whether we’ll one day be able to screen for image duplication the way we do for plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Brazen plagiarism; why animal studies don’t hold up in humans; motherhood citation penalty

Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears?

Title: Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy

What Caught Our Attention: There’s a lot going on here, so bear with us. (Ba-dum-bum.)

First, there was the paper itself, co-authored by, among others, Michael Mann and Stephan Lewandowsky. Both names may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers. Mann is a prominent climate scientist who has sued the National Review for defamation. A study by Lewandowsky and colleagues of “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” was the subject of several Retraction Watch posts when it was retracted and then republished in a different form. And the conclusion of the new paper, in Bioscience, seemed likely to draw the ire of many who objected to the earlier work: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears?

Clue fans, here’s scientific proof that it was Colonel Mustard with a candlestick

Leo Reynolds, via Flickr

When we last heard from Eve Armstrong one year ago today, she was a postdoc at the BioCircuits Institute at the University of California, San Diego, musing mathematically about what would have happened if she had asked one Barry Cottonfield to her high school prom in 1997. Today, she is a postdoc at the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania — where, it would appear from a new preprint, titled “Colonel Mustard in the Aviary with the Candlestick: a limit cycle attractor transitions to a stable focus via supercritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation,” she has solved a brutal murder.

To be more precise:

We establish the means by which Mr. Boddy came to transition from a stable trajectory within the global phase space of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a stable point on the cement floor of an aviary near the west bank of the Schuylkill River.

The preprint will be posted at arXiv tomorrow, but Armstrong did not want to keep the world in suspense any longer, so we are hosting the manuscript here at Retraction Watch on a more appropriate day, April 1. She was also kind enough to answer a few questions about the work: Continue reading Clue fans, here’s scientific proof that it was Colonel Mustard with a candlestick

Weekend reads: “Weaponized transparency;” fighting academic spam with humor; NIH cracks down

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, would you consider a tax-deductible donation of $25, or a recurring donation of an amount of your choosing, to support it? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured a major case of misconduct at The Ohio State University, the retraction of a much-criticized paper claiming to show “off-target” mutations when using CRISPR, and how fallout from a stem cell scandal ensnared a Nobel Prize winner. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: “Weaponized transparency;” fighting academic spam with humor; NIH cracks down

Ohio State just released a 75-page report finding misconduct by a cancer researcher. What can we learn?

C. K. Gunsalus

Today, the Ohio State University (OSU) announced that Ching-Shih Chen, who resigned from a professorship there in September, was guilty of “deviating from the accepted practices of image handling and figure generation and intentionally falsifying data” in 14 images from eight papers. Chen had earned more than $8 million in Federal grants, and his work had led to a compound now being testing in clinical trials for cancer. (For details of the case, see our story in Science.)

Ching-Shih Chen

OSU — which has been involved in several high-profile cases of misconduct recently — released a lightly-redacted version of their investigation report, and we asked C.K. Gunsalus, who has decades of experience reviewing similar cases, to examine it for us. A Q&A follows.

 

Retraction Watch (RW): What’s your impression of the case? How does it compare in significance with others you’ve looked at? Continue reading Ohio State just released a 75-page report finding misconduct by a cancer researcher. What can we learn?

Weekend reads: Fallout from misconduct at Duke; does journal prestige matter?; the data on fake peer review

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, would you consider a tax-deductible donation of $25, or a recurring donation of an amount of your choosing, to support it? 

The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper on a “gut makeover,” a retraction following a mass resignation from an editorial board, and the resignation of a management researcher who admitted to misconduct. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Fallout from misconduct at Duke; does journal prestige matter?; the data on fake peer review

Journal retracts study linking “gut makeover” to weight loss, improved health

Over the objections of the authors, PLOS ONE has retracted a paper linking a diet designed to restore healthy gut bacteria to weight loss and other benefits.

The study, published in June 2017, claimed to show that a “Microbiome restoration diet improves digestion, cognition and physical and emotional wellbeing.” The diet was one championed by The Gut Makeover, whose author, Jeannette Hyde, is also a co-author on the paper (which the paper clearly disclosed). The diet is “designed to improve the health and diversity of the microbiome,” the microbiota that live within us.

The paper apparently prompted some criticisms, and even led one academic editor at PLOS ONE to resign. The journal  now says “the conclusions of this study are not supported by the data presented,” and have retracted it. But the case may reveal more about the limitations of peer review at the journal than it does about any weaknesses of the study. Continue reading Journal retracts study linking “gut makeover” to weight loss, improved health

Weekend reads: No reproducibility crisis?; greatest corrections of all time; an archaeology fraud

The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper on homeopathy whose authors had been arrested; news about 30 retractions for an engineer in South Korea; and a story about how two stem cell researchers who left Harvard under a cloud are being recommended for roles at Italy’s NIH. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: No reproducibility crisis?; greatest corrections of all time; an archaeology fraud

Misconduct investigation reports are uneven at best. Here’s how to make them better.

Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that over the past year or so, we have been making an effort to obtain and publish reports about institutional investigations into misconduct. That’s led to posts such as one about a case at the University of Colorado, Denver, one about the case of Frank Sauer, formerly of the University of California, Riverside, and this story on a case out of the University of Florida.

We’ve obtained the dozen-plus reports we’ve published so far by a variety of means, from public records requests to court documents to old-fashioned leaks. Reading these reports confirms what others — including the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. National Science Foundation — have found. Namely, the reports — which are subject to an inherent conflict of interest, given that institutions are investigating their own — are uneven at best.

We’d like to do something about that. Continue reading Misconduct investigation reports are uneven at best. Here’s how to make them better.