The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.
Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:
Last week, we reported on a case at the University of Leiden in which the institution found that a former psychology researcher there had committed research misconduct. In the anonymized report — which we were able to confirm regarded Lorenza Colzato, who is listed as a faculty member at Ruhr University in Bochum and at TU Dresden — the university found a lack of ethics approval for some studies and fabricating results in some grant applications. We asked the three whistleblowers in the case — Bryant Jongkees, Roberta Sellaro, and Laura Steenbergen — to reflect on their experiences. (We should note that they did not confirm it was Colzato named in the report.)
Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to come forward?
A group of researchers from Iran, Italy and the UK have retracted two meta-analyses on supplements and high blood pressure after making what a statistics expert calls a common error.
Both papers were originally published in the Journal of Human Hypertension. Here’s the retraction notice for “Elevated blood pressure reduction after α-lipoic acid supplementation: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials:”
An eye journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper on glaucoma that, given the litany of problems with the data, could well have been retracted. Not least of the issues: The authors admitted to using an outside firm to conduct experiments they’d tried to pass off as having done themselves.
In what the editor of a psychiatry journal says in an unusual case, the authors of a paper on treatments for depression have retracted it after being alerted to “inconsistencies” stemming from a change to their study design that the peer reviewers had requested.
Here’s the retraction notice, in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease:
A group of pediatric surgeons in China has lost their 2016 paper on a technique for repairing abdominal defects in children because they apparently had trouble keeping those defects straight.
The article, “A new technique for extraperitoneal repair of inguinal hernia,” appeared in the Journal of Surgical Research, an Elsevier title. The authors reported that a laparoscopic method of repairing inguinal hernias in children was superior to conventional, open surgery. According to the authors, they had nearly 1,900 patients to prove their point.
In a recent Retraction Watch guest post on the “Eysenck affair,” James Heathers notes the extraordinary possibility that as many as 61 Hans Eysenck publications might be retracted.I believe this figure is a significant underestimate.
This reckoning has been a long time coming. The issues surrounding Eysenck’s 1980s/1990s collaboration with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek and their unbelievable results linking personality to health outcomes have been known for decades. Many eminent researchers, including Tony Pelosi and Louis Appleby, had lined up to criticise this research even while it was still ongoing.
In 2010, I published a lengthy biography of Eysenck, Playing with fire, that detailed the context for this collaboration. In the final full chapter, I explained what prompted Eysenck to team up with this outsider figure and laid bare the extent of Eysenck’s deep and longstanding relationship with the tobacco industry. It was backed by extensive archival research and interviews with key players (including two days with Grossarth-Maticek). I had hoped it would provoke a reappraisal and remedial action. But the impact was minimal.
A paper by Ping Dong, a former researcher at Northwestern who left her post less than a year after having a paper retracted from Psychological Science, has been subjected to an expression of concern.
And then there’s the approach taken by Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Fredrickson is perhaps best known for her work on the “positivity ratio,” around which she has built a significant brand. The idea, in a nutshell, is that you’ll be more successful if you have three positive emotions for every negative one. It is a compelling and bite-sized idea, and has been turned into a book.
We have a tension about resolving inaccuracies in scientific documents when they’re past a certain age.
Specifically, what should we do with old papers that are shown to be not just wrong, which is a fate that will befall most of them, but seriously misleading, fatally flawed, or overwhelmingly likely to be fabricated, i.e. when they reach the (very high) threshold we set for retraction?
To my way of thinking, there are three components of this:
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