Social psychologist Diederik Stapel has notched his 58th retraction, after admitting he fabricated data in yet another article.
He’s holding onto his 4th place spot on our leaderboard.
This latest retraction is for “Correction or comparison? The effects of prime awareness on social judgments,” published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. As usual for Stapel, this paper has been retracted because he fabricated data.
Here’s the note:
We’re presenting a Q&A session with Peter Wilmshurst, now a part-time consultant cardiologist who has spent decades embroiled in misconduct investigations as a whistleblower.
Retraction Watch: A UK judge recently upheld two findings of dishonesty by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service against Andrew Dowson, director of headache services at King’s College Hospital and your former co-investigator. Were you pleased with the verdict? (Last week, Dowson also began a four-month suspension from practicing medicine in the UK.)
Peter Wilmshurst: In part, because I was pleased that he was shown to be dishonest, because I knew that he was, which was why I reported him. But I wasn’t pleased in the sense that I don’t think the investigation dealt with all the issues involved in the Migraine Intervention with STARflex Technology (MIST) Trial.
RW: What additional issues did you hope to see addressed? Continue reading My life as a whistleblower: Q&A with Peter Wilmshurst
An article about the use of vaccines against pertussis — also known as whooping cough — didn’t include the fact that the author has received grants and consultancy fees from three pharmaceutical companies that help make or sell the vaccines.
The correction to “Pertussis in young infants: a severe vaccine-preventable disease,” published in Autopsy and Case Reports just a few months after the paper, cites a “desktop publishing error” that led to the following problems: Continue reading Publisher error removes industry conflicts in vaccine paper
A new project does the relatively straightforward task of comparing reported outcomes from clinical trials to what the researchers said they planned to measure before the trial began. And what they’ve found is a bit sad, albeit not entirely surprising.
As part of The Compare Project, author and medical doctor Ben Goldacre and his team have so far evaluated 36 clinical trials published by the top five medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and British Medical Journal). Many of those trials included “switched outcomes,” meaning the authors didn’t report something they said they would, or included additional outcomes in the published paper, with no explanation for the change.
Here are the latest results from the project, according to its website:
Continue reading Did a clinical trial proceed as planned? New project finds out
A heart researcher who fabricated patient records has notched retraction number six — this time, for a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has two more retractions forthcoming.
The retraction comes at the request of Anna Ahimastos’s co-authors, following an investigation into her work by her former workplace, the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute. The investigation was not able to verify the data referenced in the letter, which includes a citation for a recently retracted JAMA paper.
The retraction note is similar to others for Ahimastos’s papers:
Continue reading NEJM pulls letter by heart researcher who faked patient records
Memorial University in Canada has released a five-year-old report of an investigation, confirming a former nutrition professor had committed misconduct in a 2001 paper.
The 53-page report — about Ranjit Kumar Chandra, a prominent and once-lauded researcher — focuses on a Nutrition paper that examined the effectiveness of vitamins patented by Chandra. The report, authored by MUN professor emeritus William Pryse-Phillips, lists 41 problems with the paper, which it concludes:
…was not in full compliance with the scientific, ethical, and/or integrity standards of Memorial University at the time.
The paper was retracted in 2005; the report is dated 2009. We asked Pryse-Phillips why the university took so long to release it. He told us:
A major correction has been posted for an update to international guidelines on reporting outcomes of people receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Circulation published the paper online in 2014; the correction was issued before it appeared in print, in the journal’s September 29, 2015 issue. “When reviewing the final proof for print publication, the author noticed some errors and requested changes,” according to a spokesperson for the journal’s publisher, the American Heart Association.
The notice is so long, we’re only including the first paragraph, most of which is taken up by just the title of the paper:
Continue reading Mega-correction for updated CPR reporting guidelines
A paper suggesting that exposure to sunlight might help prevent hip fractures in the elderly has been retracted, due to duplication and “concerns about the underlying data.”
An expression of concern that appeared last July flagged the 2005 paper as containing text that matched another paper with the same first author that was published in 2011. According to the publisher, that duplicated text sparked a closer look at the text, which raised concerns about the scientific integrity of the paper.
The retraction note, published by the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, says that the first author was responsible for the content of the paper: Continue reading Osteoporosis paper felled by concerns with “scientific integrity”
A PLOS One paper on morphine treatment for cancer cells has a couple issues with figures, prompting a massive correction — what we affectionately call a “mega-correction” — by the journal.
In one figure, there was “an undisclosed splice.” Another figure contained two panels that were “mistakenly from the same sample.”
The 2013 paper in question, “Chronic Morphine Treatment Attenuates Cell Growth of Human BT474 Breast Cancer Cells by Rearrangement of the ErbB Signalling Network,” has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the correction:
Continue reading Cropped, spliced image leads to a PLOS One correction
Prominent 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