In 2016, Mingjun Zhang, a biomedical engineering researcher at The Ohio State University, along with collaborators, published a paper that explored the mechanism behind ivy’s impressive adhesive strength. In it, the authors claimed to report the genetic sequences of the proteins making up the adhesive.
But shortly after publication, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter to OSU and PNAS simultaneously: “The authors have knowlingly [sic], intentionally, repeatedly, and substantially misrepresented data in order to publish the manuscript.”
A group of researchers in Canada has retracted their 2018 paper on the gene sequence of the Arctic charr — a particularly hearty member of the Salmonidaefamily that includes salmon and trout — after discovering that the sample they’d used for their analysis was from a different kind of fish.
Two months after announcing it would review an early 2020 paper on a way to detect the virus that causes COVID-19, a journal says that “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled.”
The review of the paper, “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR, by the journal, Eurosurveillance, was prompted by critiques including a petition by some 20 people around the world for what they called “scientific and methodological blemishes.” The senior author of the Eurosurveillance paper, Christian Drosten, of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, has been a leader in the fight against the pandemic, but has also predictably drawn criticism from those who oppose lockdowns.
On December 3, the journal issued a statement saying they were reviewing the allegations, which, as editors note in their statement dated yesterday:
One of the many fun things about reporting on retractions is that we get to expand our statistical knowledge. To wit, follow along as we explore the concept of immortal time bias.
A JAMA journal has retracted and replaced a paper by authors at the University of Massachusetts after another researcher identified a critical statistical error in their study.
The paper, “Association of Antibiotic Treatment With Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized for an Asthma Exacerbation Treated With Systemic Corticosteroids,” was written by a group led by Mihaela Stefan, the associate director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science at UMass, and appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019.
A year and a half after its publication, the paper is the subject of two critical blog posts, one by Nick Brown and one by Ethan and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. In the days since we first shared embargoed drafts of those posts with Hall, he and the sleuths engaged in a back and forth, and Brown and the Ludwin-Peerys now say they are satisfied that many of the major issues appear to have been resolved. They have also made changes to their posts, including adding responses from Hall.
In short, it seems like a great example of public post-publication peer review in action. For example, the Ludwin-Peerys write:
When we took a close look at these data, we originally found a number of patterns that we were unable to explain. Having communicated with the authors, we now think that while there are some strange choices in their analysis, most of these patterns can be explained…
In a draft of their post shared with us early last week — see “a note to readers” below — the Ludwin-Peerys said that some of the data in the study “really bothered” them. In particular, they write, the two groups of people studied — 20 received ultra-processed foods, while 20 were given an unprocessed diet — “report the same amount of change in body weight, the only difference being that one group gained weight and the other group lost it.” They were also surprised by the “pretty huge” correlation between weight changes and energy intake.
Brown’s draft post, which digs into the data, concludes:
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2020 paper by researchers in Korea who have used 3-D printing to create artificial eyes for dogs.
The study triggered a slew of critical comments from readers, who were outraged by the ethics of the research and what they saw as inadequate protections for the animals against pain.
The first author of a highly controversial — and now retracted — paper linking body weight to integrity calls the journal’s decision to pull the article “a bitter surprise” and its handling of the article after publication “deeply unfair.”
More than five months after outraged readers demanded that a Springer Nature journal retract a paper linking body mass index to honesty, the publication has been pulled.
The journal now says that a post-publication review of the article found that the data don’t support the authors’ conclusions — which is another way of saying that the pre-publication peer review missed that fact.
PLOS ONE has retracted a paper on pneumonia in people with Covid-19 after the authors could not allay concerns about the integrity of their data.
The article, “Lung ultrasound score in establishing the timing of intubation in COVID-19 interstitial pneumonia: A preliminary retrospective observational study,” appeared in September and was written by a group from Zhejiang University School of Medicine, in Hangzhou, China.
In the article, “The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance,” the authors — a trio from New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi — write that “While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career.” It drew nearly immediate criticism, for example:
The recent @NatureComms paper doesn’t tell us much about the impact of gender on mentorship but it sure does tell us that the statistics community needs to do a better job teaching scientists about correlation, causation, and confounding
On November 19, the journal added an editor’s note saying it would be looking into these criticisms, and today, the article was retracted following review by three experts. The retraction notice reads, in part:
