Category: society error

Society error leads to published — then retracted — Alzheimer’s abstract from top group

Alzheimer’s & Dementia has retracted a meeting abstract the journal published without the OK of the researchers, a top group from Harvard, who submitted it but withdrew the work before the conference.

That, as they say, might require some unpacking. Maybe this will make things clearer.

Raj Hooli, a graduate student in the lab of Rudolph Tanzi, a leading neuroscientist at Harvard — where he holds the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy endowed chair of neurology — had submitted the abstract, “Genome-wide assessment of copy number variations in early-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” for consideration at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD).

As Tanzi explains: Continue reading Society error leads to published — then retracted — Alzheimer’s abstract from top group

EurekAlert retracts press release, and a Guardian reporter sanctioned by EurekAlert reports on it

Cross-posted from Embargo Watch

EurekAlert has withdrawn a press release after realizing that it contained unsupported statements about climate change. As Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian reports:

An online news service sponsored by the world’s premier scientific association unwittingly promoted a study making the false claim that catastrophic global warming would occur within nine years, the Guardian has learned.

The study, by an NGO based in Argentina, claimed the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020 and projected dire consequences for global food supply. A press release for the Food Gap study was carried by EurekAlert!, the news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) , and the story was picked up by a number of international news organisations on Tuesday.

Read the rest of Goldenberg’s story. It’s quite illuminating.

EurekAlert posted a statement that reads, in part: Continue reading EurekAlert retracts press release, and a Guardian reporter sanctioned by EurekAlert reports on it

American Cancer Society drops ‘Screening is Seeing’ ad campaign

When we started Retraction Watch, Gary Schwitzer suggested that one of us might be a vampire.

Well, Schwitzer, let us say this: You are no Jesus.

However, criticism leveled by Schwitzer at an American Cancer Society (ACS) ad campaign earlier this week has accomplished the Retraction Watch equivalent of turning water into wine. The campaign, he wrote, Continue reading American Cancer Society drops ‘Screening is Seeing’ ad campaign