Lawsuits are usually dry and boring, so it’s always fun to read one with a little life.
Here’s one of those: CrossFit, the fitness program famous for its brief, strenuous exercises and passionate devotees, is suing the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NCSA), which it considers its staid competitor for the nation’s sweat and cash.
According to CrossFit, the NSCA published a study with a “falsified rate of injury,” “in an effort to portray CrossFit as ‘dangerous’ and therefore a fitness program that should be avoided.”
No matter that the study, published in NSCA’s official research journal, the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, concluded overall that CrossFit is a useful form of exercise. The suit says that the authors fudged a few statistics about participants’ injuries. Here’s the relevant section from the paper, titled “Crossfit-based high-intensity power training improves maximal aerobic fitness and body composition:”
You’ve got to love when an author is willing to detail the specifics of an unhelpful retraction notice.
Researchers at Qingdao University have fully retracted a paper originally published in Molecular Medicine Reports with a clear, detailed outline of what went wrong and how they discovered the error.
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The South African Journal of Botany has retracted a 2012 paper that claimed a variety of herbal extracts have antioxidant and anti-fungal properties, due to errors in “at least” one figure.
Two papers on “novel techniques” have been retracted with what is unfortunately a very non-novel technique: an odd notice and silence when we asked for comment.
The authors of a paper showing a link between immune response and depression requested a retraction after they realized they’d merged two spreadsheets with mismatching ID codes.