Category: psychology

Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues. 

Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted. 

A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.

The recent retraction came through the efforts of psychologist Russell Warne, who unearthed the report with the help of a couple librarians, posted it on his blog, and contacted journals about its findings. 

In a blog post about the report, Warne summed up the case: 

Continue reading In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted.

Joe Hilgard’s son wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s sharp eye for bad data when an Elsevier journal notified the social psychologist that it intended to retract a 2015 article he’d flagged on the link between exposure to violent media and aggression in adolescents. 

Well, the journal has finally retracted the paper – but not before Hilgard’s son was born and started speaking (more on that in a moment). 

Hilgard’s ability to spot bad data, and his tenacity at holding journals accountable for their publications, has now led to five retractions. Four of those papers belong to a researcher in China named Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in Chongqin. As readers of this blog might recall, Zhang lost a pair of papers in 2019 after Hilgard and others raised questions about the integrity of the data. 

As Hilgard, who also notified Southwest University about his findings, told us back in 2019 about Zhang’s previously retracted papers: 

Continue reading Which takes longer to produce: An infant who can sit on his own, or a retraction?

Two years after a psychology researcher in The Netherlands was found guilty of  misconduct, including manipulating data and cutting co-workers out of publications, a new report says she deserves more retractions. 

In November 2019, as we reported, Lorenza Colzato was found guilty by an investigation at Leiden University of having failed to obtain ethics ethics approval for some of her studies, manipulating her data and fabricating results in grant applications. 

At the time, the institution – which Colzato had left for TU Dresden – called for the retraction of two of the researcher’s papers. Both were pulled, and we spoke to the three whistleblowers about lessons of the case.

However, the Leiden University weekly newspaper Mare has learned that a subsequent inquiry – a report on which appeared without announcement in November 2021– concluded that 15 of Colzato’s articles appeared to contain evidence of misconduct:

Continue reading University recommends seven more retractions for psychology researcher

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a nine year old paper, which purported to find that people associate morality with brightness (that’s light, not smarts), after a data sleuth found problems with the results. 

The article, “Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness,” appeared in Psychological Science in 2012 and was written by a group of marketing researchers at the Winston-Salem State University, in North Carolina, the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona. 

Aaron Charlton, a marketing researcher at Illinois State University who’s involved in replication efforts in his field, told us that he decided to take a closer look at the data in the paper, which he noted had been the subject of two previous attempts to replicate the key findings, after seeing this post on PubPeer. 

Continue reading ‘I have zero complaints about the process’: Post-publication analysis earns perception paper a flag

The publishing firm Wiley says it is investigating a pivotal paper about a controversial public health tool after Retraction Watch reported on a robust critique of the article which highlighted a number of potentially serious flaws with the research.

We’re talking about the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), whose developer, Donald Morisky, has been hitting researchers with hefty licensing fees — or demands to retract — for nearly two decades. 

One of the key papers supporting the validity of the MMAS-8 (the second iteration of the MMAS) was a 2008 article by Morisky and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Hypertension. 

Continue reading Publisher investigating paper a lucrative scale is based on following Retraction Watch reporting

As long-time readers of this blog know, we’ve spilled more than a few pixels on the work of Donald Morisky. His Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) has been a financial boon to himself — and the bane of many researchers who have been forced to either retract papers or pay Morisky what they consider to be exorbitant fees to retroactively license the instrument.  

But lately things have been a bit rocky for Morisky. Last year, he and his former business associate (read, legal enforcer) found themselves embroiled in a lawsuit which claims, as we reported, that Morisky used: 

their company as a personal piggy bank and taking steps to starve the business of clients and funnel money to his family. 

And now, a researcher has questioned the validity of the MMAS, arguing that his review of a foundational paper underpinning the instrument shows serious flaws. 

Continue reading Scale whose copyright owner defends zealously falls under scrutiny — and journal takes two years to publish a critique

We’re pleased to present an excerpt from chapter 10, “The Replication Crisis,” of Augustine Brannigan’s The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology (Routledge 2021), with permission from the publisher.

Contemporary social psychology has been seized over the past years by a loss of credibility and self-confidence associated with scientific fraud and unsuccessful attempts to replicate the modern corpus of knowledge. The most notorious case was that of Dietrick Stapel. Fifty-eight papers published over a decade and a half were retracted due to fraud and suspicious research practices.

One of the most poignant questions raised by the review committees in three universities where he worked was how it was possible for such dubious scientific practices to escape the notice of all the academic reviewers in the high-profile journals, the funding agencies and at the scientific conferences. Many statistical anomalies were identified readily by statisticians who assisted in the review of Stapel’s papers. The committees were forced to conclude that “there is a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data. The observed flaws were not minor ‘normal’ imperfections in statistical processing, or experimental design and execution, but violations of fundamental rules of proper scientific research.” The culture contributed to the absence of skepticism about Stapel’s extraordinary findings.

Continue reading Social psychology in the age of retraction

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has retracted a 2018 paper because, according to a retraction notice, the first author changed data in a way that “resulted in incorrect and misleading results.”

The article, “Cardiovascular and self-regulatory consequences of SES-based social identity threat,” claims to show that socioeconomic status-based “social identity threat can go from ‘in the air’ to ‘under the skin’ to influence physiological and self-regulatory processes.” It has been cited twice in addition to the retraction notice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Here’s the retraction notice:

Continue reading Columbia grad student faked data in study of socioeconomics and life experiences, says retraction notice