In 2018, a newly minted PhD made an uncomfortable discovery.
At a conference, he saw other researchers presenting the results of their attempt to replicate the work of one of his fellow students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who had found a relationship between heavy rainfall and the number of prisoners in Nigeria in the first half of the 20th century.
But they couldn’t replicate the findings.
Continue reading Dutch university can revoke PhD for fake data, court rules
A cognitive psychologist in Germany has lost one of two papers slated for retraction after her former institution found her guilty of misconduct.
In a 2019 report, Leiden University found that Lorenza Colzato, now of TU Dresden, had failed to obtain ethics ethics approval for some of her studies, manipulated her data and fabricated results in grant applications. Although the institution did not identify Colzato by name, Retraction Watch confirmed her identity.
The Leiden report — the conclusions of which were affirmed by the Netherlands Board on Research Integrity last month — called for the retraction of two papers by Colzato and her co-authors, three of whom acted as whistleblowers in the case. As the trio told us in an interview last December:
Continue reading Psychologist’s paper retracted after Dutch national body affirms misconduct findings
Since last year, a half-dozen researchers have been having a debate: Should the humanities focus on replication? No, said Sarah de Rijcke and Bart Penders in Nature last August: “Resist calls for replicability in the humanities.” In the most recent piece on this subject, de Rijcke and Penders were joined by J. Britt Holbrook to again say “no.” Here, Rik Peels, Lex Bouter, and René van Woudenberg, who have been in the “yes” camp, respond. Continue reading Do the humanities need a replication drive? A debate rages on
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of “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” was the subject of several Retraction Watch posts when it was retracted and then republished in a different form.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?
The University of Amsterdam has requested another retraction for a prominent social psychologist, after reviewing the dissertations he supervised while at the university.
The university made the announcement this week after reviewing the theses supervised by Jens Förster, whose own work has been subject to considerable scrutiny.
The results of this investigation come more than two years after an initial probe into Förster’s work, which found several of his papers likely contained unreliable data; three of these papers have been retracted and four have received expressions of concern. Förster, who recently left his position at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany to start a private psychology practice, has always maintained that he did not manipulate his data. In 2015, he turned down a professorship, citing the toll the investigation had taken. Continue reading University requests 4th retraction for psychologist under fire
As a scientist, are you always focused on improving your metrics by such means as getting papers into prestigious journals? Do your funders and institutions add to that pressure to get ahead? If so, you may be at risk of a new psychiatric condition known as “Publiphilia Impactfactorius” — or, simply, PI, described in a PeerJ preprint. We talked to first author Joeri Tijdink at VU Medical Center (VUmc) in Amsterdam about this tongue-in-cheek take-down of the scientific condition, and whether there is any cure for the affliction.
Retraction Watch: You describe several new personality traits and clusters. Tell us more about this.
Continue reading Obsessed with getting cited? You may have “Publiphilia Impactfactorius”
Historians, economists, biochemists, psychologists: Who reuses their own material most often? Does the rate depend on how many authors a paper has, and how far along a researcher is in his or her career? Serge Horbach and Willem Halffman at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands tried to answer these questions by reviewing more than 900 papers published by researchers based in The Netherlands. And they were surprised by their findings, published last month by Research Policy.
Retraction Watch: How does the amount of text recycling you identified among researchers at Dutch universities (6.1%) compare to what other studies have shown among other groups of researchers?
A social psychology journal has added an expression of concern to a paper by prominent social psychologist Jens Förster, whose work has been subject to much scrutiny.
This is the latest in a long-running saga involving Förster. The 2012 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology had been flagged by a 2015 report describing an investigation into Förster’s work, which had concluded the paper likely contained unreliable data. Several other papers that received similar designations in that report have either been retracted or received expressions of concern (EoC).
The (paywalled) notice provides a lengthy explanation for why the journal chose to add an EoC, rather than retract the paper, as the University of Amsterdam had recommended. Here is an excerpt:
Continue reading Journal adds concern notice to paper by psychologist Jens Förster
On June 10, Psycho-Oncology, a journal that publishes research on the “psychological, social, behavioral, and ethical” side of cancer, received a complaint.
In a letter, Ad Kaptein, a researcher at the Leiden University Medical Centre, in the Netherlands, wrote to say that a review and meta-analysis published by the journal that month hadn’t adequately cited the relevant literature in the field, including seven studies co-authored by Kaptein himself. The authors of the original paper say they had considered citing Kaptein’s work but decided against it, for various reasons.
The journal considered Kaptein’s complaint valid enough to publish his letter. But the letter carries the title “Expression of concern” — a term usually reserved for editorial notices issued by the journal to warn readers about some aspects of an article. But in this case, the author supplied the term, not the journal — yet the letter is tagged as an Expression of Concern on PubMed, giving the impression the paper has received a formal editorial notice.
Journal Co-Editor Maggie Watson told Retraction Watch:
The Annals of Surgery has retracted two papers it never intended to publish.
According to journal’s editor, Keith Lillemoe, the papers—published in 2015, two months apart—had undergone full peer review and were rejected, “like 90% of submissions to our journal:”
The decision was clear and the authors were notified.
But somehow, Lillemoe said, “our publishing team mistakenly published the papers and placed them into [e-pub] status totally unbeknownst to the editorial team.”
The authors of one paper told us they were unhappy with how the journal handled the situation.
Lillemoe noted:
Continue reading Surgery journal retracts two papers it didn’t mean to publish