A group of insectologists is receiving praise on social media for retracting a 2022 paper in which they claimed, erroneously, it turns out, to have discovered a novel ant fossil.
The paper, “An Eocene army ant,” appeared in November in Biology Letters, a Royal Society title. The authors were led by Christine Sosiak, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. The paper has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
For a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads when trying to put a date on primeval events like the crystallization of the magma ocean on the moon or the early formation of Earth’s continental crust.
Their problem? A revised estimate of the half-life of a radioactive isotope called samarium-146 that is used to gauge the age of ancient rocks.
The updated value, published in 2012 in Science, shortened samarium-146’s half-life by a whopping 35 million years, down to 68 million years from the standard estimate of 103. This reset the clock on the solar system’s early history and suggested the oldest rocks on Earth could have formed tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.
The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.
Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.
Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:
Last week, we wrote about the story of Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam who had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. The paper would end up retracted. At the time, Lodder had not had a chance to respond to our questions about the case. We’re pleased to share his comments as a guest post.
I’ve had a big passion for research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics ever since I had started my undergraduate in biomedical sciences at Amsterdam University College. I am currently a MSc Artificial Intelligence student and about a year ago, in preparation for a computational neuroscience course, I wanted to expand on the model used by Rubén.
I sent him an e-mail explaining the situation, and requesting some parameters that weren’t detailed in the paper so that I could start running the simulations myself. Rubén responded very quickly and was immediately very helpful with getting me started with running the simulations.
Now that I was able to run the model properly, I wanted to start off with being able to reproduce the paper’s analysis results before looking into expanding. Using the methodology described in the paper, I re-implemented the steps needed to compute the entropy. And indeed, this is where I got some different results as presented in the paper.
Sometime after it was published, Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports.
But the findings of the study wouldn’t replicate. And unlike some researchers who might blow off criticism of their work, or blame the replicators for the failure, Herzog sent Lodder the scripts his team had used.
Lodder found the problem quickly. As Herzog related to Retraction Watch, Lodder (whose schedule has been challenging the past few weeks as we’ve played phone tag) [See update on this post.]:
The authors of a 2020 paper in Cell are earning plaudits after they retracted the study following the publication of an article last year that contradicted their earlier findings.
But as the retraction notice says, a paper published last year in The EMBO Journal by Jakob Nilsson and Gianmatteo Vit of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found that wasn’t true:
Mitch Brown was preparing last August to launch a follow-up study to a 2021 paper on coalitions when he found something in his computer coding that sent his stomach to his shoes.
As Brown, an experimental psychologist at the University of Arkansas, recalled for us:
A group of neuroscientists in Germany and Hungary is calling for the retraction of two of their recent papers after discovering a fatal error in the research.
Myriam Sander, a memory researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, took to social media on Wednesday to alert her followers to the decision. In what Sander called the “most difficult tweet ever,” she wrote:
As Jason Isbell sings, doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do. But sometimes it’s even harder than it needs to be. Ask Cory Xian.
When Xian, a bone researcher at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide, and his colleagues found an error in their 2018 paper inthe Journal of Bone and Mineral Research — a top journal for the field — they notified the editors and asked for a retraction. But the journal demurred, instead issuing a correction for the article, titled “Release of CXCL12 From Apoptotic Skeletal Cells Contributes to Bone Growth Defects Following Dexamethasone Therapy in Rats.”
The correction states that “incorrect photos had been accidentally and mistakenly used by a staff person as representative photos”.
A group of researchers in Canada who’d collaborated with a one-time rising star in the bone field have retracted a 2014 article after determining that the data were unreliable.
They did so even though the paper was not a focus of the investigations into the work of Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, whose once sparkling career in endocrinology crumbled after an investigation found that she had fabricated data and took elaborate steps to cover her deception — from doctoring patient records to changing the temperature of a freezer at a government blood facility to damage samples that might reveal the fraud.
