Category: investigator error

Prominent nutrition researcher Marion Nestle retracting recent article

jphp_journal_coverProminent nutrition expert Marion Nestle is pulling an opinion piece she recently co-authored in the Journal of Public Health Policy following revelations that the piece contained multiple factual errors and failed to reveal her co-author’s ties to one of the subjects of the article.

The article, “The food industry and conflicts of interest in nutrition research: A Latin American perspective,” was published October 29 and raised concerns about the conflicts of interest that can occur when a food company pairs with a public health organization. Specifically, the article critiqued the supposed relationship between the biggest beverage distributor in Guatemala and the leading Guatemala-based public health organization, aligned to distribute a fortified supplement for undernourished children.

However, after the paper appeared, Nestle learned they had misrepresented the relationship between the key parties, and failed to disclose that her co-author, Joaquin Barnoya, received “a substantial portion of his salary” from INCAP. Retracting the opinion was the best solution, Nestle wrote on her blog today: Continue reading Prominent nutrition researcher Marion Nestle retracting recent article

Editors weren’t “unable to verify reviewer identities” — reviewers just weren’t qualified

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We can’t resist flagging some misleading language in a retraction note for a 2015 paper on the inner workings of an amoeba pathogen.

The note for “The Charms of the CHRM Receptors: Apoptotic and Amoebicidal effects of Dicyclomine on Acanthamoeba castellanii” is short, so we’re going to give it to you up front:

This accepted manuscript has been retracted because the journal is unable to verify reviewer identities.

Sounds like another case of faked emails to generate fake peer reviews, right? But that’s not what happened to this paper, according to the editor in chief of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Louis B. Rice, a professor at Brown University:

Continue reading Editors weren’t “unable to verify reviewer identities” — reviewers just weren’t qualified

“Carelessness” forces Science to correct paper about immune booster

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Science is fixing images in a paper published online in April that discovered an immune-boosting protein, after the authors mistakenly mixed up similar-looking Western blots.

The paper, which received some press coverage, identified a protein that helped the immune system fight off cancers and infections. Philip Ashton-Rickardt, a scientist at Imperial College London who led the study, told the The Telegraph:

This is exciting because we have found a completely different way to use the immune system to fight cancer.

The editor in chief of Science, Marcia McNutt, told us that the journal contacted the authors once it learned of “irregularities” in some of the figures, which did not affect the conclusions of the paper:

Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error

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Authors have retracted a highly cited Nature letter that purported to discover a much sought-after, stable light source from quantum dots, after they realized the light was actually coming from another source: the glass the dots were affixed to.

When the paper “Non-blinking semiconductor nanocrystals” was published in 2009, it received some media coverage, such as in Chemistry World. That’s partly because very small sources of “non-blinking” light could have wide-ranging, big-picture applications, author Todd Krauss, a physical chemist at the University of Rochester, told us:

Off the top of my head, a quantum computer. Quantum cryptography is another one. People want a stable light source that obeys quantum physics, instead of classic physics.

The retraction note, published Wednesday, explains how the researchers found out the effect was coming from the glass, not quantum dots:

Continue reading Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error

Correction restores confidence in results of confidence study

Strategic Management JournalA study that looked at how entrepreneurs’ confidence levels change depending on market conditions has been corrected to fix an error that flipped the results of one of the experiments.

The paper was published in 2013 by the Strategic Management Journal, and explored how entrepreneurs stay confident in difficult marketplaces by studying how people reacted to tasks of varying difficulty. In one experiment, participants were asked how well they thought they did on an easy quiz and how well they did on a hard quiz. Results showed that “participants underestimated their scores on the easy quiz” and “overestimated their performance on the difficult quiz.” However, authors wrote the opposite in the final paper.

Here’s the correction notice for “Making Sense of Overconfidence in Market Entry”:

Continue reading Correction restores confidence in results of confidence study

Analysis of pilots with prostate cancer retracted for “inappropriate data”

Aerospace Medicine and Human PerformanceIn case any pilots out there are worrying about their risk of prostate cancer based on a recent meta-analysis that found they are at least twice as likely to develop the disease, they should relax — the paper has been retracted.

The reason: “including inappropriate data from two studies that should be ineligible.”

“The risk of prostate cancer in pilots: a meta-analysis” reviewed eight studies to determine whether airline pilots, who are regularly exposed to radiation and other occupational hazards, have a higher incidence of prostate cancer. However, it also included studies that reported on prostate cancer among all U.S. Armed Forces servicemen, not pilots.

The retraction notice was posted in May — only months after it was published in Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance in February. The notice included a letter to the editor outlining flaws in the meta-analysis and an apologetic response from first author, David Raslau at the Mayo Clinic.

Here’s the notice (appearing at the bottom of page 2):

Continue reading Analysis of pilots with prostate cancer retracted for “inappropriate data”

Data “mismatch” and author’s illness pluck bird sex-ratio study from literature

coverInaccessible data and an author’s illness are to blame for the retraction of a paper on sex ratios of baby finches, according to the authors.

The paper, “Experimental evidence that maternal corticosterone controls adaptive offspring sex ratios,” published in Functional Ecology, outlined how a hormone in mother finches can “skew” the number of males vs females that hatch from the eggs in her nest.

But after questions about the data were raised, the authors were unable to address the “mismatch” between the experimental data and those that were published. Compounding the situation is the fact that, while working on the paper, first author Sarah Pryke at the Australian National University “was suffering from a medical condition that likely impaired her cognitive abilities,” according to a statement from Pryke’s co-authors.

An email to Pryke was met with an out-of-office reply:

Continue reading Data “mismatch” and author’s illness pluck bird sex-ratio study from literature

The “worst moment of my scientific career:” Two bird migration articles brought down by analytical error

JAvianBio_ak19Evolutionary and conservation biologists in Spain are retracting two articles – one from the Journal of Avian Biology and the other from Ardeola – because they discovered a fatal flaw in their analysis.

The Journal of Avian Biology article, “Are European birds leaving traditional wintering grounds in the Mediterranean?” aimed to determine whether the abundance of passerines had decreased in recent decades, but failed to control for birds that may have gotten killed by hunters. Although it was published in January, we can only find an abstract from its acceptance by the journal in November 2014.

The authors detail the saga of their error in the retraction notice: Continue reading The “worst moment of my scientific career:” Two bird migration articles brought down by analytical error

Retraction-plagued management researcher hit with expression of concern

OrgBehav_ak13The editor-in-chief of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has issued an Expression of Concern about a 2011 paper that explores the link between ethical leadership and employee performance.

The paper, “Linking ethical leadership to employee performance: The roles of leader–member exchange, self-efficacy, and organizational identification,” is one of seven that were flagged in a report by Arizona State University (ASU) that investigated the corresponding author, Frederick Walumbwa, for possible research misconduct, as we noted in November.

“The fit statistics reported in the article contain many errors,” the notice says. It goes on to say that “it is difficult to understand the implications of these errors unless the raw data is made available” — but that the authors were not able to provide it. Here’s the full text of the expression of concern: Continue reading Retraction-plagued management researcher hit with expression of concern

Retraction and republication for Lancet Resp Med tracheostomy paper

lancetrmA paper whose expression of concern we covered in November 2014 has been retracted and republished “because of the extent of the changes necessary,” according to the Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen retraction/republications at the Lancet, accompanied by thorough breakdowns of the problem.

This study was a meta-analysis of research on how the timing of tracheostomies — placing a breathing tube directly into the windpipe — affects patients’ mortality rate. The original paper found that critically ill patients who received a tracheostomy earlier fared better than those for whom the procedure was delayed for weeks after intubation, the recommended practice.

However, when the authors calculated how many patients died, they assumed that any patient who wasn’t discharged from the intensive care unit (ICU) had died there, instead of looking for other explanations. This made their estimates unreliable.

The publisher convened a panel, which ultimately decided retraction and republication was the most appropriate course of action.

The original expression of concern contained a quote from the authors about the “data discrepancy” that would later sink the paper: Continue reading Retraction and republication for Lancet Resp Med tracheostomy paper