psychology – Page 7 – Retraction Watch

PLOS ONE paper plagiarized from 17 articles — yes, 17

A PLOS ONE paper about chronic pain plagiarized from multiple sources — 17, in fact.

According to the retraction notice released by the journal last week, the paper contains “extensive verbatim use of text from other sources.”

How did this make it past the editors? The journal published the paper in 2012 — before it began screening papers for plagiarism, according to a spokesperson.

Here’s the retraction notice for “The Effect of Social Stress on Chronic Pain Perception in Female and Male Mice:”

Continue reading PLOS ONE paper plagiarized from 17 articles — yes, 17

Duplicated data gets corrected — not retracted — by psych journal

A psychology journal is correcting a paper for reusing data. The editor told us the paper is a “piecemeal publication,” not a duplicate, and is distinct enough from the previous article that it is not “grounds for retraction.”

The authors tracked the health and mood of 65 patients over nine weeks. In one paper, they concluded that measures of physical well being and psychosocial well being positively predict one another; in the other (the now corrected paper), they concluded that health and mood (along with positive emotions) influence each other in a self-sustaining dynamic.

As a press release for the now-corrected paper put it: Continue reading Duplicated data gets corrected — not retracted — by psych journal

Context matters when replicating experiments, argues study

Background factors such as culture, location, population, or time of day affect the success rates of replication experiments, a new study suggests.

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used data from the psychology replication project, which found only 39 out of 100 experiments live up to their original claims. The authors conclude that more “contextually sensitive” papers — those whose background factors are more likely to affect their replicability — are slightly less likely to be reproduced successfully.

They summarize their results in the paper:

Continue reading Context matters when replicating experiments, argues study

PLOS editors discussing authors’ decision to remove chronic fatigue syndrome data

After PLOS ONE allowed authors to remove a dataset from a paper on chronic fatigue syndrome, the editors are now “discussing the matter” with the researchers, given the journal’s requirements about data availability.

As Leonid Schneider reported earlier today, the 2015 paper was corrected May 18 to remove an entire dataset; the authors note that they were not allowed to publish anonymized patient data, but can release it to researchers upon request. The journal, however, requires that authors make their data fully available.

Here’s the correction notice: Continue reading PLOS editors discussing authors’ decision to remove chronic fatigue syndrome data

Retractions aren’t enough: Why science has bigger problems

Scientific fraud isn’t what keeps Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University in New York, up at night. Rather, it’s the sheer number of unreliable studies — uncorrected, unretracted — that have littered the literature. He tells us more, below.

Whatever the vast majority of retractions are, they’re a tiny fraction of the number of papers that are just wrong — by which I mean they present no good empirical evidence for their claims.

I’ve personally had to correct two of my published articles. Continue reading Retractions aren’t enough: Why science has bigger problems

Publicly available data on thousands of OKCupid users pulled over copyright claim

okcupid The Open Science Framework (OSF) has pulled a dataset from 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid over copyright concerns, according to the study author.

The release of the dataset generated concerns, by making personal information — including personality traits — publicly available.

Emil Kirkegaard, a master’s student at Aarhus University in Denmark, told us that the OSF removed the data from its site after OkCupid filed a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires the host of online content to remove it under certain conditions. Kirkegaard also submitted a paper based on this dataset to the journal he edits, Open Differential Psychology. But with the dataset no longer public, the fate of the paper is subject to “internal discussions,” he told us.

In place of the dataset on OSF, this message now appears: Continue reading Publicly available data on thousands of OKCupid users pulled over copyright claim

“I shared:” Can tagging papers that share data boost the practice?

After a journal began tagging papers that adopted open science practices — such as sharing data and materials — a few other scientists may have been nudged into doing the same.

In January 2014, Psychological Science began rewarding digital badges to authors who committed to open science practices such as sharing the data and materials. A study published today in PLOS Biology looks at whether publicizing such behavior helps encourage others to follow their leads.

The authors summarize their main findings in the paper:
Continue reading “I shared:” Can tagging papers that share data boost the practice?

Biologist critiques own paper, journal retracts it — against her wishes

The journal Evolution has retracted a 2007 paper about the roles of the different sexes in searching for mates, after the same author critiqued the work in a later paper.

The case raises important questions about when retractions are appropriate, and whether they can have a chilling effect on scientific discourse. Although Hanna Kokko of the University of Zurich, Switzerland — who co-authored both papers — agreed that the academic literature needed to be corrected, she didn’t want to retract the earlier paper; the journal imposed that course of action, said Kokko.

Let’s take a look at the retraction note: Continue reading Biologist critiques own paper, journal retracts it — against her wishes

Authors retract, replace highly cited JAMA Psych paper for “pervasive errors”

Authors have retracted a highly cited JAMA Psychiatry study about depression after failing to account for some patient recoveries, among other mistakes.

It’s a somewhat unusual notice — it explains that the paper has been retracted and replaced with a new, corrected version.

The study, which included 452 adults with major depressive disorder, concluded that cognitive therapy plus medication works better to treat depression than pills alone. But after it was published, a reader pointed out that some of the numbers in a table were incorrect. The authors reviewed the data and redid their analysis, and discovered “a number of pervasive errors.”

The notice (termed “notice of retraction and replacement”) explains the consequences of those errors:

Continue reading Authors retract, replace highly cited JAMA Psych paper for “pervasive errors”

“Science advances incrementally:” Researchers who debunked gay canvassing study move field forward

How easy is it to change people’s minds? In 2014, a Science study suggested that a short conversation could have a lasting impact on people’s opinions about gay marriage – but left readers disappointed when it was retracted only months later, after the first author admitted to falsifying some of the details of the study, including data collection. We found out about the problems with the paper thanks to Joshua Kalla at the University of California, Berkeley and David Broockman at Stanford University, who tried to repeat the remarkable findings. Last week, Kalla and Broockman published a Science paper suggesting what the 2014 paper showed was, in fact, correct – they found that 10-minute conversations about the struggles facing transgender people reduced prejudices against them for months afterwards. We spoke with Kalla and Broockman about the remarkable results from their paper, and the shadow of the earlier retraction.

Retraction Watch: Let’s start with your latest paper. You found that when hundreds of people had a short (average of 10 minutes) face-to-face conversation with a canvasser (some of whom were transgender), they showed more acceptance of transgender people three months later than people with the same level of “transphobia” who’d talked to the canvasser about recycling. Were you surprised by this result, given that a similar finding from Michael LaCour and Donald Green, with same-sex marriage, had been retracted last year? Continue reading “Science advances incrementally:” Researchers who debunked gay canvassing study move field forward

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