Our mothers told us that if we used the masterbatch process, we’d go blind. And what better way to gather some updates to recent posts than to include one that involves said masterbatch process?
First, a retraction John Spevacek noticed when he tried clicking on the link in a Journal of Applied Polymer Science retraction we’d covered: Continue reading A masterbatch: More polymer retractions, gerontology journal lifts paywall, Microbiology notices appear
The International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction has retracted four papers about virtual reality for reasons that aren’t quite clear.
The common author of the studies is Dong-Hee Shin of Seoul’s Sungkyunkwan University. Here’s the retraction notice, which is signed by journal editors-in-chief Gavriel Salvendy and Julie Jacko: Continue reading Four papers about gaming and virtual worlds become more virtual and less reality as they’re retracted
Do you have a spare $37 that’s just burning a hole in your pocket?
If so, today is your lucky day. You can plunk down your hard-earned cash for a chance to read a retraction notice in Clinical Gerontologist that resulted from a goof by its publisher, Taylor & Francis.
Here’s the notice for “Does Social Desirability Confound the Assessment of Self-Reported Measures of Well-Being and Metacognitive Efficiency in Young and Older Adults?” Continue reading Would you pay $37 to find out that a publisher had mistakenly printed an article twice?
Identity, which bills itself as “An International Journal of Theory and Research,” has retracted a 2013 article by an Italian researcher who stole the work from another author, then published it twice.
The paper, “Behind the mask: A typology of men cruising for same-sex act,” was ostensibly written by Stefano Ramello, an “independent researcher explores the interactions between space, erotic practices, identity, gender and sexuality.” But as the retraction notice explains, Ramello appears simply to have thrown his own name on top of an earlier paper.
Continue reading Identity theft: Psych journal retracts paper on gay sex for plagiarism
It’s not quite the Lazlo Letters of behavioral science, but the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences has issued an expression of concern after discovering that it had been publishing letters that had been published in other journals.
Here’s how the notice describes the matter: Continue reading Letter writing campaign leads to expression of concern over duplication
Amid an ongoing investigation, a group of psychology researchers at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium have taken a painful decision to retract a paper now that they’ve realized there were serious problems with one aspect of the work.
Here’s the notice for “The Emergence of Orthographic Word Representations in the Brain: Evaluating a Neural Shape-Based Framework Using fMRI and the HMAX Model,” by Wouter Braet, Jonas Kubilius, Johan Wagemans, and Hans P. Op de Beeck: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Psychology researchers retract after realizing data “were not analyzed properly”
Two more papers by Diederik Stapel — who was profiled by The New York Times Magazine this weekend — have been retracted, both in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The notice for “Hardly thinking about close and distant others: On cognitive business and target closeness in social comparison effects,” by Stapel and David Marx, and cited six times: Continue reading “Unfinished business”: Diederik Stapel retraction count rises to 53
Whose business are the reasons behind a retraction?
Our readers will no doubt know by now that we think they’re basically everyone’s — at least if journals want us to believe that they’re interested in maintaining the integrity of the scientific record. But not all editors seem to agree. Hank Edmunds, for example, didn’t in early 2011, telling us, “It’s none of your damn business.” A chemistry journal editor said, in a similar vein, “the purpose of keeping these retraction notices slim is not to produce too much detail.”
Now, a psychology journal editor joins those ranks. Here’s the notice in question: Continue reading Editor on retraction details: “I do not think this is the business of anyone but our journal, please”
Last week, we covered the complicated story of a paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues that had been removed — or at least all but the abstract — from its publisher’s site. Our angle on the story was how Frontiers, which publishes Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, where the study appeared, had handled the withdrawal. It happened without any notice, and no text appeared to let the reader know why the paper had vanished.
Today, Frontiers posted a note to readers on top of the paper’s abstract: Continue reading Update: Lewandowsky et al paper on conspiracist ideation “provisionally removed” due to complaints
Last year, Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues posted a paper, scheduled for an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, with a, shall we say, provocative title:
NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax
An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
In an interview last year with Lewandowsky, NPR gathered some of the reactions to the paper — which was formally published two days ago — from those it profiled: Continue reading Why publishers should explain why papers disappear: The complicated Lewandowsky study saga