Category: sage

Divorce study felled by a coding error gets a second chance

home_cover (1)A journal has published a corrected version of a widely reported study linking severe illness and divorce rates after it was retracted in July due to a small coding error.

The original, headline-spawning conclusion was that the risk of divorce in a heterosexual marriage increases when the wife falls ill, but not the husband. The revised results — published again in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, along with lengthy explanations from the authors and editors — are more nuanced: Gender only significantly correlates with divorce rate in the case of heart disease.

The authors’ note, from Iowa State’s Amelia Karraker and Kenzie Latham, at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, explains that the coding error led them to over-estimate how many marriages ended in divorce:

Continue reading Divorce study felled by a coding error gets a second chance

Paper on narcissistic CEOs earns big correction

home_coverIt may not be much of a surprise that narcissistic CEOs of pharmaceutical companies will make bold choices, such as adopting radically new technology. That idea remains true, despite a lengthy correction to a paper that supports it.

The paper, “CEO Narcissism, Audience Engagement, and Organizational Adoption of Technological Discontinuities,” in Administrative Science Quarterly, found support for the following hypothesis:

Continue reading Paper on narcissistic CEOs earns big correction

17 retractions from SAGE journals bring total fake peer review count to 250

sage-journals-logoOn Monday, we reported on 64 new retractions from Springer journals resulting from fake peer reviews. Yesterday, SAGE — which retracted 60 papers for the same reason just over a year ago — added 17 additional retractions to their list.

The articles were published in five different journals, and one retraction involved authorship fraud in addition to peer review fraud, according to a SAGE spokesperson: Continue reading 17 retractions from SAGE journals bring total fake peer review count to 250

“To our horror”: Widely reported study suggesting divorce is more likely when wives fall ill gets axed

home_coverA widely reported finding that the risk of divorce increases when wives fall ill — but not when men do — is invalid, thanks to a short string of mistaken coding that negates the original conclusions, published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

The paper, “In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life,” garnered coverage in many news outlets, including The Washington Post, New York magazine’s The Science of Us blog, The Huffington Post, and the UK’s Daily Mail . 

But an error in a single line of the coding that analyzed the data means the conclusions in the paper — and all the news stories about those conclusions — are “more nuanced,” according to first author Amelia Karraker, an assistant professor at Iowa State University.

Karraker — who seems to be handling the case quickly and responsibly —  emailed us how she realized the error:

Continue reading “To our horror”: Widely reported study suggesting divorce is more likely when wives fall ill gets axed

Retraction of monkey paper linked to problems at shuttered research institute

Veterinary Pathology.Evidence of poorly treated lab animals has led researchers to retract a 2014 article in Veterinary Pathology that explored the neurological effects of dehydration in squirrel monkeys.

The study was pulled after Frederick Wang, the former director of the New England Primate Research Center, unveiled reports of a dozen squirrel monkeys that were found dehydrated and dead in their cages or euthanized between 1999 and 2011.

Wang told the Boston Globe in April that “human error” and “inadequate animal care” might have compromised the results of the study:

Continue reading Retraction of monkey paper linked to problems at shuttered research institute

“Values were outside expected ranges”: Toxicology paper spiked after audit

Toxicological PathologyResearchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have retracted a 2014 article after a review unearthed unresolved problems with the study’s control material.

The retracted paper, “Effect of Temperature and Storage Time on Sorbitol Dehydrogenase Activity in Sprague-Dawley Rat Serum and Plasma,” looked to test the durability and stability of sorbitol dehydrogenase, an enzyme used to detect cancerous liver damage in rats.

Here’s the complete retraction notice from Toxicologic Pathology :

Continue reading “Values were outside expected ranges”: Toxicology paper spiked after audit

“This article was published in error”: Economics paper defaults

EDQ_ak14An economist in Taiwan has retracted a paper about from Economic Development Quarterly because it was “published in error.”

The paper — first published online March 5, 2013 — addresses the influence of information and communication technology on economic growth.

According to the notice, the paper included “the original dataset and excerpts from an earlier draft of the paper co-written by the author and colleagues.” The only listed author, Yi-Chia Wang, asked that the article be retracted before making it into print, but it looks like it was included in the February, 2015 issue of the journal.

Here’s the notice for “How ICT Penetration Influences Productivity Growth: Evidence From 17 OECD Countries”: Continue reading “This article was published in error”: Economics paper defaults

Retraction appears for social psychologist Jens Förster

forster-j-a1
Jens Förster

A retraction has appeared for Jens Förster, the former University of Amsterdam social psychologist whose work has come under serious scrutiny by two official committees.

Here’s the notice for 2012’s “Sense Creative! The Impact of Global and Local Vision, Hearing, Touching, Tasting and Smelling on Creative and Analytic Thought,” a paper which first appeared in Social Psychological and Personality Science:
Continue reading Retraction appears for social psychologist Jens Förster

Retraction, tell-all style, for breast cancer radiology paper

acta radHere at Retraction Watch, we don’t believe in the expression “TMI.” But this case features a level of detail we’re not sure we’ve seen before.

Acta Radiologica has pulled a 2012 article on breast cancer imaging for being a duplicate publication — a sin the retraction notice takes great pains to point out.

The notice, written by journal editor Arnulf Skjennald, has the blow-by-blow feel of a police report: Continue reading Retraction, tell-all style, for breast cancer radiology paper

Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal

jvcWhen we heard about this retraction, we were forced to ask: Are there any articles left in Journal of Vibration & Control?

The publication was forced to retract 60 papers by the same author in July, after he was caught exploiting a technological loophole to review his own papers.

Now, papers on loading cargo ships has been felled by a much less tech-savvy method: Two authors submitted a paper to both Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems and the Journal of Vibration & Control, both of which accepted and published the paper.

The authors, Yousef M. Al-Sweiti and Dirk Soeffker, have now lost three papers in total. Here’s the joint notice from SAGE and Taylor & Francis (we’ve added links to relevant retractions): Continue reading Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal