Category: by subject

Meet two data sleuths who paid a steep price for raising concerns about a problematic paper

Researchers Malte Elson and Patrick Markey probably didn’t know what they were getting into when they first raised questions about a problematic study of the possible effects of violent video games.

Like many other data sleuths out there, they simply wanted to ensure the scientific record wasn’t muddied by problematic data — particularly in such a high-profile area with a potentially profound impact on policy.  Although their efforts ultimately paid off — the paper was retracted, and the first author lost her PhD — they also paid a price. Continue reading Meet two data sleuths who paid a steep price for raising concerns about a problematic paper

A publisher just retracted ten papers whose peer review was “engineered” — despite knowing about the problem of fake reviews for years

Many publishers have been duped by fake peer reviews, which have brought down more than 600 papers to date. But some continue to get fooled.

Recently, SAGE retracted 10 papers published as part of two special collections in Advances in Mechanical Engineering after discovering the peer review process that had been managed by the guest editors “did not meet the journal’s usual rigorous standards.” After a new set of reviewers looked over the collections, they determined 10 papers included “technical errors,” and the content “did not meet the journal’s required standard of scientific validity.”

Yeah, we’re not exactly sure what happened here, either. SAGE gave us a little extra clarity — but not much.

Continue reading A publisher just retracted ten papers whose peer review was “engineered” — despite knowing about the problem of fake reviews for years

Journals punished by high-profile indexing service cry foul, demand a recount

A group of editors of journals focused on the history of economics has gone public to urge Clarivate Analytics, which publishes a highly influential ranking of journals, to reconsider its decision to drop the titles from this year’s index.

Clarivate said it suppressed the titles because of apparent “citation stacking,” in which various editors agree to cite one another to boost their journals’ Impact Factors (JIFs). The metric is based on average rates of citation over a given period. As we noted in a June 26 post about the suppressions, suppressing titles Continue reading Journals punished by high-profile indexing service cry foul, demand a recount

Researchers pull Nature paper over first author’s objections

Researchers have retracted a 2015 Nature paper about the molecular underpinnings of immune function after discovering they could not replicate key parts of the results.

The first author, Wendy Huang — who started working as an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, only months after the paper appeared — did not sign the retraction letter, published last week. The research was conducted while Huang was working as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, home of last author Dan Littman (also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

What happened appears to be a case of “he said, she said:” Littman asked to retract the paper after his lab couldn’t reproduce it, and Huang insists the data remain correct, saying the process had been “unfair and done without due process:”

Continue reading Researchers pull Nature paper over first author’s objections

A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.

Jodi S. Cohen

Here’s a story that shows the lengths a public university — The University of Illinois at Chicago — went to block the release of information about a child psychiatry trial gone wrong, and how a reporter — Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica — fought them effectively at every turn to reveal the truth.

Earlier this year, ProPublica “revealed that the National Institute of Mental Health ordered the university to repay $3.1 million in grant money it had received to fund [Mani] Pavuluri’s study.” This kind of clawback is very, very rare.

We tipped our hats to Cohen then, because we had been trying for years to obtain documents that would tell the full story of the Pavuluri case, which we had been covering since 2015 when a retraction appeared. In particular, we’ve been trying to get the university to release their report of the investigation into Pavuluri’s work. We have been making a push for such reports, as we noted earlier this week in a roundup of more than 16 of them. Continue reading A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.

A misconduct probe — which led to 20 retraction requests — took four years. Why?

Santosh Katiyar

A probe into the work of a researcher who studied natural products for cancer had many stops and starts along the way — including five extensions granted by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity — according to documents obtained by Retraction Watch.

Following a public records request, we recently obtained a copy of the report on the investigation of allegations of misconduct by Santosh Katiyar, issued jointly by the University of Alabama Birmingham and the Birmingham VA Medical Center. As a result of the report, the institutions have requested 20 retractions of work by Santosh Katiyar, who received millions in funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. 

How does the report stack up?

Continue reading A misconduct probe — which led to 20 retraction requests — took four years. Why?

Fecal transplant paper pulled for “personal issue”

Last month, the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition pulled an article on fecal transplantation for a reason that, well, doesn’t pass the sniff test.

The paper, by Sonia Michail of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, appeared online in October 2017 and described a randomized controlled trial of fecal transplants to treat kids with ulcerative colitis. (If you’re interested, here’s an overview of how fecal transplantation works.) The trial, or one awfully like it, is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, and shows Michail as the lone investigator on the study, which is aiming to gather more than 100 participants.

But the journal retracted the article — which was the subject of a laudatory editorial in the journal pointing readers to the findings — with an entirely opaque statement, saying that the work   

Continue reading Fecal transplant paper pulled for “personal issue”

Journal holds firm on decision not to retract Macchiarini paper, despite outside pressure

Earlier this year, the president of the Karolinska Institute, Ole Petter Ottersen, contacted the journal Respiration, saying KI had conducted an investigation and determined that a 2015 paper co-authored by once-lauded surgeon Paolo Macchiarini had been tainted by misconduct. Please retract the paper, Ottersen said. When the journal said no — opting to publish correspondence from KI and the authors’ response instead — Ottersen posted some of their correspondence online, in an attempt to pressure the journal to do the right thing. It’s not going to work, according to Thomas H. Nold, publication manager at Karger, which publishes Respiration. We spoke to Nold about the journal’s plans for the paper.

Retraction Watch: How do you feel about KI’s decision to publish your correspondence?

Continue reading Journal holds firm on decision not to retract Macchiarini paper, despite outside pressure

Two years of stonewalling: What happened when a scientist filed a public records request for NASA code

Nathan Myhrvold

Retraction Watch readers may know Nathan Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in physics, as the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, or as the author of Modernist Cuisine. They may also recall that he questioned a pair of papers in Nature about dinosaurs. In that vein, he has also been raising concerns about papers describing the sizes of asteroids. (Not everyone shares those concerns; the authors of the original papers don’t, and astronomer Phil Plait said Myrhvold was wrong in 2016.) Last month, Myhrvold published a peer-reviewed paper as part of his critique. The final version of that paper went live today, as did a story about the science in The New York Times and a detailed explanation by Myrhvold in Medium. As the discussion over the results continues, here he shares his experience trying to obtain details about the methodology the authors used.

Two years ago, I uploaded a preprint to arXiv.org describing what I considered serious problems, including apparently irreproducible results, that I had uncovered when analyzing a set of research articles published by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) NEOWISE project. NEOWISE is the largest scientific analysis of asteroids ever conducted; the researchers on the project have so far published estimated sizes of more than 164,000 objects in the solar system, estimates they have claimed were all derived by applying a standard approach to raw observations from the WISE space telescope.

My findings generated quite a stir in the media, including stories in The New York Times, Science, and Scientific American, among other outlets. My hope and expectation was that shining light on these troubling issues would spur the JPL researchers to retract or correct their papers. At the very least, I thought, they would release the various unpublished techniques that they had used in a series of highly cited papers, stretching from 2011 to 2015, thus lifting the veil of secrecy that had prevented me and other astronomers from replicating their results. Continue reading Two years of stonewalling: What happened when a scientist filed a public records request for NASA code

Does the Mediterranean diet prevent heart attacks? NEJM retracts (and replaces) high-profile paper

The New England Journal of Medicine has retracted a 2013 paper that provided some proof that the Mediterranean diet can directly prevent heart attacks, stroke, and other cardiovascular problems.

The original paper, “Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet,” has been cited 1,759 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But the findings haven’t disappeared — the authors have replaced the paper with a new version, which softens its earlier claims. Continue reading Does the Mediterranean diet prevent heart attacks? NEJM retracts (and replaces) high-profile paper