An article based on results from an online survey has been retracted for data issues, and an Australian university is investigating what happened.
Thearticle, “International nursing students’ perceptions and experiences of transition to the nursing workforce – A cross-sectional survey,” became available online on Jan. 29, 2022.
Published in the journal Nurse Education in Practice, the study reported 110 responses to an online survey of nursing students who came to Australia from other countries and planned to remain there to work.
A pair of researchers in Turkey have lost a 2021 paper on a randomized controlled trial in pediatric surgery after a reader raised concerns about the methodology reported in the article.
However, the retraction notice – detailed though it might be – reveals that the problems could, and likely should, have been caught during peer review.
A nursing journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a researcher in Scotland after learning that she’d taken a wee bit more credit for the article than she deserved.
O’Connor had been a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow before moving to the University of Edinburgh, from which she received the Florence Nightingale Scholarship, a year-long fellowship award for nursing researchers. While at Edinburgh, she wrote and published the paper in question, using data that she’d had access to in Glasgow.
A series of back and forth publications about a 12-year-old study of nursing education ended with some unusual editorial decisions.
Darrell Spurlock, a professor of nursing at Widener University and director of the university’s Leadership Center for Nursing Education Research, co-authored a study of the Health Education Systems, Inc. (HESI) nursing test in 2008. He and his colleague found that the test was a poor predictor of failure on the National Counsel Licensure Exam (NCLEX-RN).
More than a decade later, a critique of the paper, by Dreher et al., appeared out of the blue, published last year inNursing Forum, a Wiley journal. Spurlock takes issue with the way his research was portrayed in the critique, which paints a more positive picture of the HESI test.
Too many papers cite retracted research — even after it’s been retracted. It’s a problem. It can be especially a problem in clinical fields, where patient care is at stake. Recently, Richard Gray at La Trobe University in Australia and his colleagues examined the scope of the problem in the nursing field, noting how many systematic reviews included findings from retracted clinical trials. We spoke with Gray about their findings, published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies — and what they might mean for the safety of patients.
Retraction Watch: Retractions are a concern in any field, but as you note, when clinical practice is at stake, it can be particularly worrisome. Do you think your findings raise any potential concerns about patient safety?
We all make mistakes – but when it comes to the scientific literature, too many authors are making critical mistakes in their list of references, making it difficult for readers to retrieve a cited paper. We spoke with Marilyn Oermann, the Thelma M. Ingles Professor of Nursing at the Duke University School of Nursing, who has studied this problem extensively in the nursing literature.
When a researcher encountered two papers that suggested moonlight has biological effects — on both plants and humans — he took a second look at the data, and came to different conclusions. That was the easy part — getting the word out about his negative findings, however, was much more difficult.
When Jean-Luc Margot, a professor in the departments of Earth, Planetary & Space Sciences and Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to submit his reanalysis to the journals that published the original papers, both rejected it; after multiple attempts, his work ended up in different publications.
Disagreements are common but crucial in science; like they say, friction makes fire. Journals are inherently disinterested in negative findings — but should it take more than a year, in one instance, to publish an alternative interpretation to somewhat speculative findings that, at first glance, seem difficult to believe? Especially when they contain such obvious methodological issues such as presenting only a handful of data points linking biological activity to the full moon, or ignore significant confounders?
Margot did not expect to have such a difficult experience with the journals — including Biology Letters, which published the study suggesting that a plant relied on the full moon to survive: Continue reading Why publishing negative findings is hard
We just discovered this second retraction, which appears in the September 2015 issue of the journal, but was posted online last year.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, Debra Jackson, confirmed the dates and said that “a commercial company” brought the matter to their attention. After the journal asked a statistician to weigh in, they stated that a “substantial re-write would be required to correct the article,” and a retraction would be “the most suitable course of action.”
Although she said the authors initially sought to correct, not retract, the study, they eventually agreed with the decision.
By our count, this is the third retraction for first author, Moon-fai Chan, all for “overlap” with other papers.
As we reported in May, the Journal of Advanced Nursingretracted a paper co-authored by Chan for “major overlap” with a paper in JCN, that too the result of the investigation. We’ve also learned that the journal Nursing & Health Sciencesissued a similar notice last year for another pair of overlapped papers.
The Journal of Advanced Nursing has retracted a 2006 paper by a group of authors in Hong Kong who lifted much of the text from a previous article of theirs in a competing publication.
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