data issues – Retraction Watch

‘Anyone can do this’: Sleuths publish a toolkit for post-publication review

For years, sleuths – whose names our readers are likely familiar with – have been diligently flagging issues with the scientific literature. More than a dozen of these specialists have teamed up to create a set of guides to teach others their trade.

The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG) aims to make “post-publication peer review” more accessible, according to the preprint made available online today. The 25 guides so far range from general – “PubPeer commenting best practices” – to field-specific – like spotting issues with X-ray diffraction patterns.

Although 15 sleuths are named as contributors on the project, those we talked to emphasized the project should be largely credited to Reese Richardson, the author of the preprint.

Science and the significant trend towards spin and fairytales

What do fairytales and scientific papers have in common? Consider the story of Rumpelstiltskin.

A poor miller tries to impress the king by claiming his daughter can spin straw into gold. The avaricious king locks up the girl and tells her to spin out the gold. She fails, until a goblin, Rumpelstiltskin, comes to her rescue.

In science, publishers and editors of academic journals prefer to publish demonstrably new findings – gold – rather than replications or refutations of findings which have been published already. This “novelty pressure” requires presentation of results that are “significant” – usually that includes being “statistically significant.”

Nature earns ire over lack of code availability for Google DeepMind protein folding paper

A group of researchers is taking Nature to task for publishing a paper earlier this month about Google DeepMind’s protein folding prediction program without requiring the authors publish the code behind the work.

Roland Dunbrack, of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, peer-reviewed the paper but was “not given access to code during the review,” the authors of a letter submitted today, May 14, to Nature – including Dunbrack – write, “despite repeated requests.”

A Nature podcast said AlphaFold3 – unlike AlphaFold2 – “can accurately predict protein-molecule complexes containing DNA, RNA and more. Although the new version is restricted to non-commercial use, researchers are excited by its greater range of predictive abilities and the prospect of speedier drug discovery.”

University of New Mexico investigation finds manipulated data and images, prompts retractions

A research group at the University of New Mexico has lost at least two papers after an inquiry found evidence of manipulated data.

One article, “Large-Area Semiconducting Graphene Nanomesh Tailored by Interferometric Lithography,” appeared in 2015 in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, and has been cited 25 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The other, “Vertical Charge Transfer and Lateral Transport in Graphene/Germanium Heterostructures,” was published in 2017 in the American Chemical Society’s journal Applied Materials & Interfaces. It has been cited twice.

The senior author on both articles was Sanjay Krishna, who has since moved to the Ohio State University, where he is the George R. Smith Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The retraction notice for the paper in Scientific Reports states:

Journals flag concerns in three dozen papers by nutrition researchers

Journals have flagged more than three dozen articles by a team of authors in Iran for concern over the integrity of their data. The moves have come in the 15 months since data sleuths raised questions about the data in more than 170 papers from the group.

Among the most recent moves, a nutrition journal has issued expressions of concern for three of the team’s articles. The papers, which appeared in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN), from Taylor & Francis, were published in 2015 and 2017. The senior author on all three articles was Zatollah Asemi (also listed as Zatolla Asemi), a specialist in metabolic diseases who sits on the faculty of Kashan University of Medical Sciences.

Concerns about the findings from Asemi’s shop have been circulating for several years. The group came under scrutiny on PubPeer three years ago, when a commenter noticed apparent irregularities in the data in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology. That paper has yet to be flagged in any way.

Here’s why you shouldn’t try to republish a paper you had retracted for plagiarism

A trio of speech researchers in India has lost a 2020 paper for a trifecta of malpractice: plagiarism, self-plagiarism (of a previously retracted article, no less!) and falsification of data.

The article, “Speech enhancement method using deep learning approach for hearing-impaired listeners,” appeared in January in Health Informatics Journal, a Sage title.

According to the abstract:

Brand researchers have a second study retracted due to data “anomalies”

Three researchers who study consumers’ relationships with brands have lost their second paper, this one a study which sought to explain why some people buy things to relieve inner conflicts, because of “data and analysis anomalies.”

The study, “Identity Threats, Compensatory Consumption, and Working Memory Capacity: How Feeling Threatened Leads to Heightened Evaluations of Identity-Relevant Products,” was originally published July 6, 2018 in the Journal of Consumer Research, an Oxford University Press title and retracted on July 3, 2020.

The study was authored by Nicole Coleman of the University of Pittsburgh, Patti Williams, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrea Morales of Arizona State University.

The retraction notice says:

Authors questioning papers at nearly two dozen journals in wake of spider paper retraction

Talk about a tangled web.

The retraction earlier this month of a 2016 paper in the American Naturalist by Kate Laskowski and Jonathan Pruitt turns out to be the tip of what is potentially a very large iceberg.

This week, the researchers have retracted a second paper, this one in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for the same reasons — duplicated data without a reasonable explanation.

Dan Bolnick, the editor of the American Naturalist, tells us:

Neuroscience group retracts Science paper

A group of neuroscientists in Switzerland have retracted a 2019 paper in Science whose first author they say falsified data in the study.

The article, “Insular cortex processes aversive somatosensory information and is crucial for threat learning,” came from the lab of Ralf Schneggenburger, of the Ecole Polytechniqe Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). The first author was Emmanuelle Berret, then a post-doc in the lab.

EPFL issued a press release about the study when it appeared. According to the release, the research showed that the insular cortex — a region “deep within the lateral sulcus” — is in charge of processing how mice and humans (pace, James Heathers) apparently learn from painful stimuli:

Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news turns out to be…fake news

The authors of an much-ballyhooed 2017 paper about the spread of fake news on social media have retracted their article after finding that they’d botched their analysis.

The paper, “Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information,” presented an argument for why bogus facts seem to gain so much traction on sites such as Facebook. According to the researchers — — from Shanghai Institute of Technology, Indiana University and Yahoo — the key was in the sheer volume of bad information, which swamps the brain’s ability to discern the real from the merely plausible or even the downright ridiculous, competing with limited attention spans and time.

As they reported: Continue reading Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news turns out to be…fake news

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