Category: data issues

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.”  

Continue reading Science and the significant trend towards spin and fairytales

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.”

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

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: 

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

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.

Continue reading Journals flag concerns in three dozen papers by nutrition researchers

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:

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

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:

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