Search Results for: doing the right thing

‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention.  A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked … Continue reading ‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Paper about “sexual intent” of women wearing red retracted seven years after sleuths raised concerns

A psychologist whose controversial publications on human behavior have attracted scrutiny for their implausible workload and impossible statistics has lost a third paper – seven years after sleuths first began questioning it.  The 2012 article, “Color and Women Attractiveness: When Red Clothed Women Are Perceived to Have More Intense Sexual Intent,” was published in the … Continue reading Paper about “sexual intent” of women wearing red retracted seven years after sleuths raised concerns

Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report

A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out.  The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months.  But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job … Continue reading Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report

NIH asked to replace a PI on grants after university said she violated policy

An office of the National Institutes of Health requested earlier this year that a university designate a new principal investigator (PI) for two grants after the institution found she had violated its policy in a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned.  The NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees funding granted to external institutions, … Continue reading NIH asked to replace a PI on grants after university said she violated policy

When editors confuse direct criticism with being impolite, science loses

In January 2022, motivated by our experience with eClinicalMedicine, we wrote about mishandling of published errors by journal editors. We had noticed that the methods used for the analysis of a cluster randomized trial published in the journal were invalid. Using a valid approach, we reanalyzed the raw data, which were shared with us by the … Continue reading When editors confuse direct criticism with being impolite, science loses

Meet a sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions

Nick Wise had always been “slightly interested” in research integrity and fraud, just from working in science.  Then, last July, from following image sleuth Elisabeth Bik on Twitter, he learned about the work of Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov identifying “tortured phrases” in published papers.  Such phrases – such as “bosom peril,” meaning … Continue reading Meet a sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions

An editor on why he ignores anonymous whistleblowers – and why authors are free to publish ‘bullshit and fiction’

Just over a decade ago, in the second year of Retraction Watch’s existence, we wrote a column in the now-defunct Lab Times urging journal editors to stop ignoring complaints from anonymous whistleblowers. The Committee on Publication Ethics didn’t think anonymity was a problem as long as the complaints were evidence-based, so why should editors?  And … Continue reading An editor on why he ignores anonymous whistleblowers – and why authors are free to publish ‘bullshit and fiction’

‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

On the heels of a high-profile retraction that followed deep investigations by the Science news team, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the journal, says it’s time to improve the process of correcting the scientific record. In an editorial published today, Thorp, a former university provost, describes the often time-consuming and frustrating process involving … Continue reading ‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

A tale of (3)2 retraction notices: On publishers, paper mill products, and the sleuths that find them

Should publishers acknowledge the work of sleuths when their work has led to retractions? We were prompted to pose the question by a recent retraction from International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics of a 2021 paper. The notice reads:

Engineering researcher who cast blame on co-author will soon have 12 retractions

A civil engineering researcher will soon have 12 retractions to his name after a data sleuth notified journals of issues with image reuse in the papers.  Jorge de Brito, a professor at the University of Lisbon, has lost four papers in Construction and Building Materials, two in the Journal of Building Engineering, of which he … Continue reading Engineering researcher who cast blame on co-author will soon have 12 retractions