Category: methodological problems

In January 2022, motivated by our experience with eClinicalMedicine, we wrote about mishandling of published errors by journal editors. We had noticed that the methods used for the analysis of a cluster randomized trial published in the journal were invalid. Using a valid approach, we reanalyzed the raw data, which were shared with us by the original authors. The trial’s results were overturned. 

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, we subsequently submitted a manuscript describing why the original methods were invalid, what a valid analysis should be, and our results after conducting a valid analysis. After an initial desk rejection “in light of [the journal’s] pipeline” and further exchanges of correspondence, the journal shared our findings with the statistician involved in the original review and the original authors and sought their responses. 

After receiving the responses, both of which we thought contained factually incorrect statements, the editorial team eventually suggested that we summarize our full manuscript as a 1000-word letter for submission to the journal. We did not agree that a letter would allow us to fully communicate our methods and reanalysis. Thus, to meet the journal’s word limit while fully laying out our arguments, we posted our additional points as a preprint and cited the preprint in a letter we submitted to the journal.

It was then that we met another roadblock to correcting the literature.

Continue reading When editors confuse direct criticism with being impolite, science loses

Last year, our group noticed an improper analysis of a purported cluster randomized trial (cRCT) in eClinicalMedicine, a Lancet journal, and requested deidentified raw data from the authors to conduct a proper analysis for the study design. 

Things were off to a good start. The authors shared their data immediately – which is commendable and, in our experience, rare. We reanalyzed the data using valid statistical procedures, which overturned the published conclusions. We subsequently submitted a manuscript describing our findings to the journal where the original paper was published.

That’s when things stopped going well.

Continue reading Courage and correction: how editors handle – and mishandle – errors in their journals

Over the objection of all of the authors, a journal has retracted an article on a homeopathic approach to penis enlargement and virility after deciding that the putative remedy wasn’t potent enough for the task at hand. 

The paper, “Effects of chronic treatment with the eNOS stimulator Impaza on penis length and sexual behaviors in rats with a high baseline of sexual activity,” appeared in the International Journal of Impotence Research — a Springer Nature title — in March 2013. 

Among the authors of the article was Oleg Epstein, a Russian scientist whose company, OOO NPF Materia Medica Holding, of Moscow, makes homeopathic products. Epstein’s research has been the subject of multiple retractions, as we’ve reported, embarrassing reputable journals into whose pages he managed to publish papers on homeopathy. 

Impaza, a name which sounds more like a Subaru than a sexual aid, purportedly: 

Continue reading Coming up short: Journal retracts penis enlargement paper after realizing it was homeopathy

Three years ago, the American Statistical Association (ASA) expressed hope that the world would move to a “post-p-value era.” The statement in which they made that recommendation has been cited more than 1,700 times, and apparently, the organization has decided that era’s time has come. (At least one journal had already banned p values by 2016.) In an editorial in a special issue of The American Statistician out today, “Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond P<0.05,” the executive director of the ASA, Ron Wasserstein, along with two co-authors, recommends that when it comes to the term “statistically significant,” “don’t say it and don’t use it.” (More than 800 researchers signed onto a piece published in Nature yesterday calling for the same thing.) We asked Wasserstein’s co-author, Nicole Lazar of the University of Georgia, to answer a few questions about the move. Here are her responses, prepared in collaboration with Wasserstein and the editorial’s third co-author, Allen Schirm.

So the ASA wants to say goodbye to “statistically significant.” Why, and why now? Continue reading Time to say goodbye to “statistically significant” and embrace uncertainty, say statisticians