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The researchers who earlier this week called for the retraction of their hotly debated paper on police shootings and race say the reasons for their decision to pull the article have been misinterpreted. 

Crime researchers David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and Joe Cesario, of Michigan State University, initially referred in a retraction statement to citations to the work of Heather Mac Donald, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who wrote about the PNAS article for the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal.

Those pieces, Cesario and Johnson said, had unfairly co-opted the paper, ““Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” to argue against the existence of racial bias in police shootings. 

In an amended statement, the authors noticeably omit references to Mac Donald. On Wednesday, Cesario told Retraction Watch: 

Continue reading Retraction of paper on police killings and race not due to “‘mob’ pressure” or “distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly,” say authors

Journals have issued expressions of concern for seven more papers by Hans Eysenck, including one for a paper the now-deceased psychologist published in the middle of World War II. 

Suspicions about Eysenck, who died in 1997, surfaced in the early 1990s, if not before. At least 14 of his papers have been retracted so far — a total his biographer has said could well eclipse 60. And 71 have now been hit with expressions of concern.

The latest such moves come from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which issued the following notice: 

Continue reading 77-year-old paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck earns an expression of concern

The previous and current editors in chief of a psychology journal have apologized for publishing an article about which one of them writes, “in retrospect I can certainly see that their article does feed into racist narratives.”

Earlier this month, we reported that the authors of “Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent Crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ,” first published in January in Psychological Science, had requested its retraction because they realized they had not vetted the research behind the paper well enough before submitting.

In a retraction notice dated yesterday, the journal’s current editor in chief, Patricia Bauer, writes that the article “has been retracted at the request of the authors:”

Continue reading Editors in chief past and present apologize for publishing article that “feed[s] into racist narratives”