Niko McCarty

What is a figure about budgies doing in four different plant papers?

As Antonella Longo was peer-reviewing a study for the journal Plant and Soil, she became “alarmed by one figure.” The figure’s title — ”Level2 GO terms of Melopsittacus_undulates” — seemed to be a misspelled reference to a bird species called Melopsittacus undulatus.

More commonly known as a budgie or parakeet, undulatus is a vibrantly colored parrot found in scattered parts of Australia. So what was a figure about a bird doing in a study about plants?

Concerned, Longo, of the BioDiscovery Institute at the University of North Texas, searched the internet for words used in the figure, “GO terms of Melopsittacus undulates.” She identified at least three additional studies that contained an image similar to the one in the study she was peer-reviewing, each with an identical title and color scheme, but with varying data. None of the studies are about birds.

“The whole thing is yucky:” When you’re surprised to find yourself as an author on a paper

David Cox

When David Cox noticed on Dec. 10, 2020 that two papers in the journal Cluster Computing listed him as an author, he didn’t think much of it at first.

I have a common name, so it is not unheard of to have an article written by another David Cox assigned to my profile. I thought that was what these papers must have been at first, but then I opened the articles and saw my affiliation, email, and picture in them.

Shocked, Cox tweeted that “the whole thing is yucky.” The corresponding author on the two studies now says that he plans to withdraw the papers, and that a co-author made the decision to include Cox’s name and has been fired from his research position over the incident. Yesterday, on January 25, the publisher flagged one of the papers.

Cox, who is the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, in Cambridge, Mass., learned about the articles after logging on to DBLP, a bibliography website that tracks articles published by computer scientists. “I check these sites from time to time to make sure everything is correct,” he said.

“I don’t think I slept for a day and a half:” Bad news for study about bad news

A journal has retracted a 2018 paper that linked negative news coverage to physical and mental health problems.

The article, “When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health,” was published in Frontiers in Psychology in August 2018. The study has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. In March 2020, an article in The Conversation used the study’s findings to argue that kids should reduce their television intake during the coronavirus pandemic to ward off anxiety.

First author Jolie Wormwood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, said she decided to pull the study after revisiting the dataset. She found that some of the study participants—95 people in the Boston area—who completed a questionnaire three different times during a nine month period, gave inconsistent answers about their memory of an event. That normally might not be too worrying, since memories “shift over time”, according to Wormwood, but a bit more sleuthing revealed that the researchers had inadvertently mixed up the IDs that were assigned to study participants.

Wormwood explained the error in an email:

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