Here at Retraction Watch, we are reminded every day that everybody (including us) makes mistakes — what matters is, how you handle yourself when it happens. That’s why we created a “doing the right thing” category, to flag incidents where scientists have owned up to their errors and taken steps to correct them. We’re not suggesting … Continue reading The consequences of retraction: Do scientists forgive and forget?
As every mushroom lover knows, weekend mycology is no sport for the lily-livered. Tasty species often look awfully like their deadly cousins. Turns out, typing can even be problematic for the experts. Natural Products Research is retracting a 2014 paper on shelf fungus because… well, it wasn’t about shelf fungus after all. The paper, “Chemical … Continue reading Fungus among us, but what kind? Typing error spawns retraction for mushroom paper
ACS Catalysis has retracted a 2012 research letter from a chemistry lab that discovered an error in their experiments. According to last author Rory Waterman at the University of Vermont, an undetected reaction caused his lab to mistakenly mischaracterize the products of an iridium catalyst. The diligence of a graduate student brought it all to … Continue reading Catalyst for change: grad student catches error in chem experiments, prompts retraction
The authors of a 2014 paper on soccer injuries have forfeited their publication after revealing that the foundation of the work was based on faulty data. (Look, we could have written about letting air out of balls, yadda yadda, but the Super Bowl has come and gone.) The article, which appeared in the Journal of … Continue reading He shoots, he…misses! Soccer injury paper gets red card for data errors
This week at Retraction Watch featured polar opposites: Two new entries in our “doing the right thing” category, and one in our plagiarism euphemism parade. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
One of the papers from a massive heart disease study in China, published in the Lancet, has been retracted and republished after the authors noticed a statistical error. The article, by authors from Peking Union Medical College in China, Yale University, and elsewhere, presented the results of the China PEACE-Retrospective Acute Myocardial Infarction Study, part of … Continue reading Lancet retracts and republishes cardiology paper with admirable notice
Yesterday was our fourth birthday. We published our first post, “Why write a blog about retractions?” on August 3, 2010, and the anniversary seems as good a time as any to review where we’ve been. Here were some highlights of the past twelve months:
We came across a rather long-toothed retraction in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, which represents a case of doing the right thing (similar to that involving the apparent first-ever English language retraction from 1756, about which we wrote in 2012). The 1927 notice came in the form of a letter by C. H. … Continue reading Dipping into history: An 87-year-old retraction in a statistics journal
Benjamin Barré, a genetics researcher who recently set up his own group at the University of Angers, is retracting four papers he worked on as a graduate student and postdoc. Neil Perkins, in whose lab Barré was a postdoc, and Olivier Coqueret, in whose lab he did his PhD, tell Retraction Watch:
Another busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s what was going on around the web in scientific publishing and related issues: “The part of our paper that I [Conley] regret is our crazy biological interpretation. I don’t know what I was thinking or why reviewers didn’t spank me on that…” A wonderfully honest quote from a … Continue reading Weekend reads: One researcher resents “cyberbullying” while another wishes peer reviewers would spank him