The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has retracted a highly influential 2012 paper by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University whose work has been called into question over concerns about the data in some of his publications.
This post was updated at 1145 UTC on August 13, 2021. In the original post, we noted that Joseph Powell and Gibran Hemani had not responded to our request for comment, which we sent shortly after learning under embargo from Nature that this retraction would be published. However, Powell did respond, copying Hemani, as Powell noted in a Twitter thread, and the email never reached us. We have added Powell’s comments, and updated the first sentence of the post to reflect them. We are also investigating why Powell’s email never arrived. We apologize for the errors regardless of the cause, and appreciate the opportunity to update.
The authors of a 2014 research letter in Nature have retracted their article, with near but not entire unanimity, after “new work led to interpretation of the original results being no longer fully valid,” according to the senior author.
Titled “Detection and replication of epistasis influencing transcription in humans,” the letter was written by a group from Australia, Europe and the United States led by Gibran Hemani, then of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, and now of the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the paper was Joseph Powell, also then of Queensland but now at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in Darlinghurst, Australia. The paper has been cited 114 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
A journal has issued expressions of concern for three papers from 2014 and 2015 by a group at Stony Brook University in New York whose work has come under scrutiny on PubPeer for suspect images.
The articles, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, were written by Adan Aguirre, a pharmacological scientist at Stony Brook, and his colleagues. Several other papers by Aguirre’s group — in various iterations of co-authors — have been flagged on PubPeer over the years.
Two years after being alerted to a questionable figure in a 2016 paper by a group with a questionable publication history, a PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern about the article.
The penultimate author of the paper is Chitra Mandal, of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. Mandal’s name appears dozens of times on PubPeer, where posters have flagged the figures in her papers. In a 2019 article in The Hindu, Mandal hinted that an institutional investigation into her work was underway but she dismissed the problems as “unintentional minor mistakes”:
The authors of a prizewinning paper on how large financial institutions hedge risk have retracted their article and have returned the award after another researcher could not replicate the findings.
The paper, “Risk Management in Financial Institutions,” was published in 2019 in the Journal of Finance by a group from Duke University, in Durham, N.C., and HEC Paris, in France. In January 2021, the article received a 2020 Brattle Prize Distinguished Paper in Corporate Finance for the work, which has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The prize carries a $10,000 award.
But when Paul Guest, a finance scholar at King’s College London, in the United Kingdom, tried to replicate the study, he found he could not. In an article published earlier this month in the Journal of Finance, Guest detailed his approach, which revealed: “six discrepancies in [the article’s] reporting, coding, and data.”
According to the retraction notice, the authors say they are returning the Brattle Prize:
The authors of a 2020 paper in Science Advances on how human sperm propel themselves in a corkscrew fashion like “playful otters” have retracted their article after concluding that their analysis didn’t support their conclusions.
The article, by Hermes Gadêlha, of the University of Bristol, in England, and several colleagues in Mexico, spawned significant coverage in the lay and science press — including this segment on NPR’s Science Friday and an article in Science (the work behind it was the subject of this YouTube video titled “The great sperm race”).
At the heart of the paper, “Human sperm uses asymmetric and anisotropic flagellar controls to regulate swimming symmetry and cell steering,” was the use of a technology called high-speed 3D microscopy to analyze sperm in motion. Per the abstract:
The authors of a paper on the antidepressant effects of ketamine have retracted their article for a lack of reproducibility — but readers have no way of knowing that because the journal declined to say as much in the retraction notice.
If that sounds like a tale from the pages of the Journal of Neuroscience, that’s because it is. We’ve taken the journal to task over the years for its pitiful retraction notices, which seem to take the default position of saying absolutely nothing — even in cases where readers have good cause to be skeptical of the findings.
This time, however, the top editor told us that the notice should have said more but it “slipped through the cracks.”
Cureus has retracted a pair of case studies after the authors revealed that the informed consent they’d received from the patients had been revoked.
The fate of articles — both by authors in the United Kingdom — highlight the precariousness of papers that rely on consent from patients or, in one instance, their proxies.
One paper, “Failure of an Ancient Breast Implant Can Lead to Significant Morbidity,” described the case of a 90-year-old woman who ruptured a 60-year-old breast implant. (The first silicone breast implants arrived in 1962, so the 60-year-old prosthesis would have been among the earliest to be inserted.)
After an author requested a slew of changes to a published paper, journal editors reviewed the study and spotted “additional concerns” that led to its retraction.
Provide defense-focused graduate education, including classified studies and interdisciplinary research, to advance the operational effectiveness, technological leadership and warfighting advantage of the Naval service.
Chu’s paper, which appeared in Scientific Reports in January 2020, argued that:
