A week after news that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) would have a new interim director shortly comes news that the agency will also have a new director of its investigative division as of early next month.
Starting August 4, Alexander Runko will be the director of the ORI’s Division of Investigative Oversight (DIO). He is already working at the agency as an investigator.
According to the ORI:
Continue reading U.S. government watchdog names investigative director
Two weeks ago, we covered the retraction of a PLoS ONE paper on mindfulness following criticism — dating back to 2017 — by James Coyne. At the time, the corresponding author, Maria Hunink, of Erasmus and Harvard, had not responded to a request for comment. Hunink responded late last week, saying that she had been on vacation, and with her permission we are posting her comments — including a correction she and her co-authors had originally drafted –here in the spirit of what she called “a fair and open discussion on Retraction Watch.”
We sent an email to PLoS ONE in response to their intention to retract our paper explaining why we disagree with retraction but it seems they did not change their statement and went ahead with retraction. We suggested that discussing the methodological issues is a more rational approach and beneficial than retraction but received no response.
In spite of its methodological limitations, we feel the paper is a valuable contribution. Continue reading Should a paper on mindfulness have been retracted? A co-author weighs in
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of how an editor solved a mystery about bad data, a new addition to our leaderboard, and a project designed to identify a common mistake in clinical trials. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Stem cell trial halted; Nazi doctors in the literature; is it OK to cite a paper you haven’t read?
Better late than never? Or too little too late?
Those are two different ways to look at a recent retraction.
Eight years after one of the most infamous retractions in science — that of the 1998 paper in The Lancet in which Andrew Wakefield and colleagues in the UK claimed a link between vaccines and autism — the journal Lab Medicine is retracting a paper that relied heavily on the now-discredited work. The paper, by Bernard Rimland and Woody McGinnis, of the Autism Research Institute, in San Diego, California, begins: Continue reading Journal retracts 16-year-old paper based on debunked autism-vaccine study
On Wednesday, we reported that a month after media reports of undisclosed conflicts of interest by top brass at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a researcher there had corrected two papers to include financial conflicts of interest.
Today, The New York Times and ProPublica — which had broken the original story about former chief medical officer Jose Baselga — reported on at least 13 corrections made by Sloan Kettering scientists so far, including the two by Michelle Bradbury that we reported on Wednesday. And we have learned of another correction by Bradbury, bringing the total to at least 14 — and counting.
In addition to the two October 8 corrections in Chemistry of Materials, a correction appeared yesterday in Applied Materials & Interfaces for a paper in which Bradbury was one of three corresponding authors. The correction to “Melanocortin-1 Receptor-Targeting Ultrasmall Silica Nanoparticles for Dual-Modality Human Melanoma Imaging” reads: Continue reading More than a dozen papers by Sloan Kettering researchers have now been updated with financial disclosures
Brian Wansink, the Cornell food marketing researcher who announced his resignation yesterday and has been found to have committed misconduct by the university, admits to mistakes and poor record-keeping in a statement released today.
But he insists that there was “no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation.” (See entire statement below.) Continue reading Wansink admits mistakes, but says there was “no fraud, no intentional misreporting”
A day after the JAMA family of journals retracted six of his studies, Cornell food marketing researcher Brian Wansink tells Retraction Watch that he will be retiring next year.
And Cornell said today that it found that Wansink “committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.”
[See an update with a new statement by Wansink here.]
In a statement, Wansink said: Continue reading Cornell finds that food marketing researcher Brian Wansink committed misconduct, as he announces retirement
Brian Wansink, the much-beleaguered food marketing researcher at Cornell whose work has fallen under intense scrutiny, has just had six more papers retracted, all from the JAMA family of journals.
[See an update on this post; Wansink has resigned, and Cornell has found that he “committed academic misconduct.”]
JAMA warned readers about the six studies in April, by subjecting them all to expressions of concern, and followed up with print notices in May. Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network journals, told us at the time,
Given the large number of retractions of articles with Dr. Wansink as an author there is uncertainty that the results of his publications are valid.
Today, JAMA announced it was retracting the six articles: Continue reading JAMA journals retract six papers by food marketing researcher Brian Wansink
Less than two weeks ago, PLOS ONE published a paper about the parents of teenagers who appeared to immediately start questioning their gender identity around the time of puberty. Then the critiques flooded in.
The paper — about a highly contentious issue — surveyed parents who felt that their children had suddenly started to question their gender identity around the time of puberty, prompting author Lisa Littman at Brown University to coin a new phenomenon as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Any discussion of transgender identity in young children can get politicized, and this paper was no exception.
The political aspect of the findings aside, readers have raised some serious concerns about the methodology behind the PLOS ONE paper. So far, multiple comments on the paper have pointed out potential issues in what one user dubbed a “fatally flawed paper” — such as the lack of a control group, the fact that Littman recruited study participants from allegedly biased websites, and only interviewed parents, not children or their clinicians. Brown University even took down a press release touting the study when it first appeared. And the journal has announced it’s taking a second look at the paper.
Earlier this year, The Advocate, a publication focused on LGBT issues, published a commentary titled “‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’” is biased junk science,” after the Journal for Adolescent Health published one of Littman’s poster abstracts. According the Advocate:
Continue reading Reader outcry prompts Brown to retract press release on trans teens
Late last year, news stories trumpeted the findings: Older women who received surgery to fix their cataracts were less likely to die over the course of a study period.
Now, the same group of authors is saying the exact opposite may be true.
Last week, the researchers retracted their 2017 paper in JAMA Ophthalmology and replaced it with an updated version that reports that women who received the surgery actually had a higher risk of dying.
The original paper was covered by many news outlets — including Reuters and the New York Times — some of which suggested the procedure may help with more than just vision (even though the study, by its nature, couldn’t determine whether or not surgery caused women to live longer). Annette Flanagin, the Executive Managing Editor for The JAMA Network, told us the publisher tried to get the word out about the significant change to the findings: