In journalism, we often joke that three cases of a phenomenon is a trend. If that’s the case, the trend of late 2019 and early 2020 would appear to be authors announcing retractions on Twitter.
In December, Joscha Legewie took to social media to say he had been made aware of an error that had caused him to retract a just-published paper on police shootings and the health of black infants. Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold did something similar just a few weeks ago.
And now, the authors of a 2016 study on the social networks of spiders have retracted the paper after finding irreconcilable problems with their data — and the first author tweeted about it.
In doing so, she was following in the foosteps of the editor in chief of the journal that published the paper, who had himself retracted a paper several years ago. Read on for more.
Continue reading ‘I’m starting the year off with something I didn’t expect to ever do: I’m retracting a paper.’
As we’re fond of repeating, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Which doesn’t jibe with the findings in an eye-catching 2018 paper that found people were less fearful of catching a contagious illness if they were in a dark room or were wearing sunglasses. 
The authors of a 2018 paper on how noisy distractions disrupt memory are retracting the article after finding a flaw in their study. 
