The authors of a 2018 paper on how much carbon soil can store have retracted the work after concluding that their analysis was fatally flawed.
The article, “Soil carbon stocks are underestimated in mountainous regions,” appeared in the journal Geoderma. Its authors are affiliated with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.
According to the abstract of the paper:
Continue reading Digging deeper: Authors retract soil paper so “the error we made does not propagate”
In journalism, we often joke that three cases of a phenomenon is a trend. If that’s the case, the trend of late 2019 and early 2020 would appear to be authors announcing retractions on Twitter.
In December, Joscha Legewie took to social media to say he had been made aware of an error that had caused him to retract a just-published paper on police shootings and the health of black infants. Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold did something similar just a few weeks ago.
And now, the authors of a 2016 study on the social networks of spiders have retracted the paper after finding irreconcilable problems with their data — and the first author tweeted about it.
In doing so, she was following in the foosteps of the editor in chief of the journal that published the paper, who had himself retracted a paper several years ago. Read on for more.
Continue reading ‘I’m starting the year off with something I didn’t expect to ever do: I’m retracting a paper.’
A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.
Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:
Researchers in Italy have retracted a 2019 paper on the genetics of a form of herpes virus after determining that the genomic sequences they thought they’d been analyzing proved to be something else.
The paper, “A complex evolutionary relationship between HHV-6A and HHV-6B,” appeared in July in Virus Evolution, an Oxford University Press title. The authors came from the Scientific Institute IRCCS in Lecco, and the University of Milan.
The article purported to find that:
Continue reading “Commendable”: Researchers retract a paper when they find gene sequence errors
A team of researchers in Europe has retracted a 2016 paper on how people with autism process social cues after finding an error in their analysis.
The article, “Social Bayes: using Bayesian modeling to study autistic trait–related differences in social cognition,” appeared in Biological Psychiatry, an Elsevier journal.
The senior author of the paper is Leonhard Schilbach, of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich and University Hospital Cologne. According to the abstract of the article:
Continue reading Doing the right thing: Authors retract paper on autism and social clues after realizing an error
We always hesitate to call retraction statements “models” of anything, but this one comes pretty close to being a paragon.
Psychology researchers in Germany and Scotland have retracted their 2018 paper in Acta Psychologica after learning of a coding error in their work that proved fatal to the results. That much is routine. Remarkable in this case is how the authors lay out what happened next.
The study, “Auditory (dis-)fluency triggers sequential processing adjustments:”
Continue reading Doing the right thing: Psychology researchers retract paper three days after learning of coding error
Jon Stewart is a powerful figure in American media. How powerful is he? So powerful that his departure in 2015 as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central may have tipped the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.
Continue reading “This is how science works:” Error leads to recall of paper linking Jon Stewart and election results
We often praise authors for doing the right thing by retracting with transparency. Here’s a journal that deserves recognition for its handling of a case of duplicate publication.
Acta Dermatovenerologica Alpina, Pannonica et Adriatica (ADAPA), a European derm publication, has retracted a 2018 article in smack-down fashion, calling out a co-author for deceit. The paper was a case study titled “Inflamed bilateral linear atrophoderma of Moulin in an adult woman: a case report.” According to ADAPA, a reader noticed that a virtually identical article — with the same title — had appeared in a Turkish dermatology publication in late 2017.
In an lengthy editorial, Jovan Miljković, the editor-in-chief of the journal, explained what happened after a review of the two papers found them to be “virtually identical”: Continue reading Too much skin in the game: Derm journal calls out author for duplication
The authors of a 2013 paper on antibody production in patients with rheumatoid arthritis have retracted the work in what looks to us like a case study in how to handle operator error.
The paper, “Monoclonal IgG antibodies generated from joint-derived B cells of RA patients have a strong bias toward citrullinated autoantigen recognition,” was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine by a group from the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden and elsewhere, and has been cited 128 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The last author, Vivianne Malmström, is a specialist in cellular immunology at the KI.
Here’s an excerpt from the lengthy notice: Continue reading Group issues model retraction over antibody error
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
