guest post – Retraction Watch

Guest post: NIH-funded replication studies are not the answer to the reproducibility crisis in pre-clinical research

*Barbara Smaller/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank*

President Trump recently issued an executive order calling for improvement in the reproducibility of scientific research and asking federal agencies to propose how they will make that happen. I imagine that the National Institutes of Health’s response will include replication studies, in which NIH would fund attempts to repeat published experiments from the ground up, to see if they generate consistent results.

Both Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya have already proposed such studies with the objective of determining which NIH-funded research findings are reliable. The goals are presumably to boost public trust in science, improve health-policy decision making, and prevent wasting additional funds on research that relies on unreliable findings.

As a former biomedical researcher, editor, and publisher, and a current consultant about image data integrity, I would argue that conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research. Such studies would be an impractical use of NIH funds, especially in the face of extensive proposed budget cuts.

Guest post: University of Toronto should take action on flawed breast screening study

The Canadian National Breast Screening Study conducted in the 1980s and led by researchers at the University of Toronto evaluated the efficacy of breast cancer screening in reducing mortality from breast cancer. Because the research was supposedly a “gold standard” randomized controlled trial, its results, published in academic journals and reported in the media, have influenced public perceptions and informed policy on mammography screening in several countrie s.

However, over the past decades, flaws in this study have come to light. My colleagues and I learned of failures in randomization, and we and other researchers have found other serious problems. We think these flaws strongly suggest the publications of CNBSS results should be retracted. Despite being informed of the flaws in this study in 2021, the University of Toronto has not adequately or appropriately addressed these issues.

The CNBSS was configured as two separate randomized clinical trials, one for women in their 40s at entry and the other for women in their 50s. In CNBSS1, 50,000 women ages 40-49 were supposedly randomly assigned to the intervention arm, in which they would receive up to five annual screens with two view film mammography plus clinical breast examination by a nurse, or to the control arm, where they received a single clinical examination at entry and usual care (essentially, no screening) afterwards. In CNBSS2 for 40,000 women, the randomization was between the intervention of mammography plus a clinical breast exam versus clinical exam only.

Guest post: Should Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment be retracted?

A prisoner and guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment. | *PrisonExp.org*

Philip G. Zimbardo passed away in October 2024 at age 91. He enjoyed an illustrious career at Stanford University, where he taught for 50 years. He accrued a long list of accolades, but his singular and enduring contribution to scholarship was the Stanford Prison Experiment, a simulation carried out in the university’s psychology department in August 1971. The research project became the best-known psychological analysis of institutionalization at the time.

The study has always been treated with skepticism by penologists and psychologists, and recent scholarship by social scientist Thibault Le Texier has raised fundamental questions about the scientific validity of the investigation, the originality of the research design, the unethical treatment of the subjects, and the credibility of the reported results.

Many consider Zimbardo’s SPE to be one of the classic studies of experimental psychology in the post-war period. It continues to be reported as a landmark achievement in many psychological textbooks today, despite drawing decades of criticism both in and out of the scientific literature. But considering Le Texier’s findings, should Zimbardo’s work be retracted?

Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it

Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky.

The contentious issue of what — and more importantly who — to believe, when it comes to medical science, is at a critical moment. Watchdog organizations such as Retraction Watch provide a great service to science and the public, by exposing junk scientists and their products, helping to disinfect the field with their sunlight. I commend Mr. Marcus and Dr. Oransky for their sustained efforts in this meta-discipline.

However, policing the scientific literature is a tricky business. In particular, one must be careful to apply the same standards one demands of others to one’s own work. Agreeable as many of their points are, Marcus and Oransky’s article discrediting Mawson and Jacob’s study (which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited during his confirmation hearings) falls woefully short of meeting even basic scientific editorial standards. This failure imbues their article with the same yellow hue that they decry in others’ journalism.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: