As our readers know, one of the goals of our work at Retraction Watch is to create a free, comprehensive database of retractions. That effort is generously funded by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Today, we’re excited to announce that our parent organization, The Center For Scientific … Continue reading New Retraction Watch partnership will create retraction database
We’re pleased to present a guest post from Dorothy Bishop, a researcher who focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders at Oxford University, and is also heavily involved in efforts to improve reproducibility in science, including chairing the steering committee of a recent symposium on the topic organised by the Academy of Medical Sciences. Here, she talks about … Continue reading Improving reproducibility: What can funders do? Guest post by Dorothy Bishop
Did you recently log onto your favorite journal’s website and see this? (For anyone who doesn’t want to bother clicking, it’s the video from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”) If so, your favorite journal was hijacked. In today’s issue of Science, John Bohannon (who recently published a bogus study about the benefits of chocolate) … Continue reading Can journals get hijacked? Apparently, yes
Science is fixing images in a paper published online in April that discovered an immune-boosting protein, after the authors mistakenly mixed up similar-looking Western blots. The paper, which received some press coverage, identified a protein that helped the immune system fight off cancers and infections. Philip Ashton-Rickardt, a scientist at Imperial College London who led the study, … Continue reading “Carelessness” forces Science to correct paper about immune booster
Chronic fatigue syndrome researcher Judy Mikovits was scheduled to head is heading to court today, where a California judge will would decide whether or not to dismiss her lawsuit against fourteen people and two Nevada corporations. (Note: This story has been updated. See below.) Among the defendants: the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada where Mikovits used to work; the institute’s cofounders, … Continue reading Chronic fatigue syndrome-XMRV researcher scheduled to head to court today, alleging conspiracy
Following questions about the veracity of multiple papers by his former employer, high-profile social psychologist Jens Förster has agreed to retract two papers as part of a deal with the German Society for Psychology (DGPs). Last year, Förster had a paper retracted at the request of his former employer, the University of Amsterdam (UvA). In May, an investigation commissioned by UvA found … Continue reading Psychologist Jens Forster settles case by agreeing to 2 retractions
Cunning science fraudsters may not give many tells in their data, but the text of their papers may be a tipoff to bad behavior. That’s according to a new paper in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology by a pair of linguists at Stanford University who say that the writing style of data cheats … Continue reading Can linguistic patterns identify data cheats?
A study that found a 15-fold increase in the rate of sexual trauma among men in the U.S. military — and sparked suggestions of “an epidemic of male-on-male sex crimes” in the military among conservative media outlets — has been retracted because of a flaw in the analysis. The study, published just last week, appeared … Continue reading Study claiming dramatically higher rates of male military sexual trauma is retracted
Two sets of authors have withdrawn their papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry. We’re telling you about the both together because, true to JBC form, there’s not too much to say. The retraction notices for both papers — about the molecular underpinnings of cardiac fibroblasts and melanoma cells — are identical:
A paper published in August that caught the media’s eye for concluding that feeling sad influences how you see colors has been retracted, after the authors identified problems that undermined their findings. The authors explain the problems in a detailed retraction note released today by Psychological Science. They note that they found sadness influenced how people see blues and yellows … Continue reading Got the blues? You can still see blue: Popular paper on sadness, color perception retracted