“In the original version of this Article, there were unusual aspects to the ‘Extract fecal DNA’ illustration in figure 1. These features have been removed.”
With those 25 words, “one of the greatest scientific Easter eggs in a long time” or an image that was “highly unethical,” depending on your point of view, disappeared from a paper from Scientific Reports. Continue reading “Unusual aspects” of a figure — aka a cartoon of Trump’s face in baboon feces — disappear from a journal
On June 25, 2015, following an investigation into the work of a then-graduate student at University College Cork in Ireland, the senior author of a 2014 paper in PLOS ONE requested its retraction. The paper, said senior author Zubair Kabir in an email to Iratxe Puebla, the journal’s managing editor, was “fundamentally flawed.”
Puebla responded on July 1, saying she would contact the graduate student — Olurotimi Bankole Ajagbe, corresponding author of the paper — and get back to Kabir. A few more emails, including one on Aug. 26, 2015, in which Ajagbe also requested the retraction, resulted. On August 31, Puebla wrote to Ivan Perry, head of Cork’s department of public health, where Ajagbe had been working on his PhD, to say she would discuss the case with colleagues and follow up.
And then Cork waited. Continue reading The waiting game: A university requests a retraction. Then it waits three years.
If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter this week, you have probably seen a paper from Scientific Reports that appears to contain a likeness of a certain U.S. president in a cartoon of baboon feces.
It was “one of the greatest scientific Easter eggs in a long time,” according to Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis. Continue reading Is it game over for a cartoon of Trump’s face in baboon feces? A journal issues an editor’s note for “unusual aspects”
In 2015, Peter Yoachim became interested in how long astronomers remained active astronomers or, more to the point, how long they continued publishing in astronomy.
Yoachim, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, dug into some data, “did a burst of work in late 2015/early 2016, then fizzled out by 2017 when I ran out of time to work on it.” As he told Retraction Watch: Continue reading Two years after he shared a draft of a “random brain fart side-project,” an astronomer sees a version published — without his name
You’d think that if an author asked a journal to correct a modest mistake, the journal would oblige. After all, many researchers have to be dragged kicking and screaming to correct the record.
But for Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, self-correction of a paper he had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) took far more steps than one might have hoped. Continue reading Political scientist asks for correction, gets flip-flop
Two months after Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital said they were requesting the retraction of more than 30 papers from a former cardiac stem cell lab there, two American Heart Association journals have retracted more than a dozen papers from the lab.
Yesterday, Circulation retracted three papers, and Circulation Research retracted 10. All 13 were among 15 subjected to expressions of concern last month. Continue reading Anversa cardiac stem cell lab earns 13 retractions
After a finding of data manipulation, the corresponding author of a 2014 paper by a team of researchers at Indiana University has retracted the work.
Here’s the notice in Science Translational Medicine: Continue reading Indiana University paper about lung transplantation retracted after misconduct finding
In March 2017, a group of researchers in Vancouver, along with a colleague in Philadelphia, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluding that a particular antibiotic might be useful for treating conditions in people with rare mutations.
Then, this past July, while continuing the work, they had an unexpected result. That made them suspect that the antibiotic they thought they had ordered, gentamicin, wasn’t what they thought it was. With the help of a different company that sells the antibiotic, they confirmed they were studying a different compound — and retracted the paper.
Here’s the notice for “Gentamicin B1 is a minor gentamicin component with major nonsense mutation suppression activity:” Continue reading Researchers retract PNAS paper when they realize they’d been victims of an antibiotic switcheroo
In February of this year, the Joy of Cooking launched what you could call an epic Twitter stream. Inspired by Stephanie Lee’s reporting in BuzzFeed on Brian Wansink — the food marketing researcher at Cornell who later resigned following findings of misconduct by the university — the legendary cookbook pointed out all that was wrong with a 2009 study claiming that their recipes added calories over the years. Those tweets led to coverage in The Verge, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
This week, the Annals of Internal Medicine retracted that paper, along with another. That brings Wansink’s tally of retracted papers to 17, with one of the papers retracted twice. (And no, 17 is nowhere near a record; he’s not even among the 30 authors with the most retractions in the world.) As Retraction Watch readers will likely recall, his work began to unravel when, after a 2016 blog post in which Wansink seemed to endorse p-hacking, four researchers joined forces to analyze his work.
Here’s the notice for 2009’s “The Joy of Cooking Too Much: 70 Years of Calorie Increases in Classic Recipes,” a paper that has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: Continue reading The Joy of Cooking, vindicated: Journal retracts two more Brian Wansink papers
As we’re fond of repeating, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Which doesn’t jibe with the findings in an eye-catching 2018 paper that found people were less fearful of catching a contagious illness if they were in a dark room or were wearing sunglasses.
Fortunately for us, although not for the researchers, we no longer have to live with the cognitive dissonance. The paper, the journal tells us, will be retracted for flaws in the data — which, thanks to the open sharing of data, quickly came to light.
The study, which appeared in May in Psychological Science, reported that: Continue reading Psychology journal to retract study claiming that people fear contagion less in the dark