On the surface, it would seem like a good thing when science undergirds policy decisions. But what if that science is deeply flawed? Craig Pittman, an award-winning journalist at the Tampa Bay Times and author of 4 books, writes that his new book Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther is “a tale of raw courage, of scientific skulduggery and political shenanigans, of big-money interests versus what’s right for everyone.” In this excerpt, Pittman explains what happened — and what didn’t — after a group of scientists known as the Science Review Team (SRT) found serious problems in research used to support regulatory policies involving panthers.
In 2003, the SRT released a report containing its verdict. As you might guess, it ripped apart Maehr’s work, piece by piece, and yes, they called him out by name. They didn’t label him a fraud, but they made it clear that Dr. Panther had done some pretty shady things.
Because they were scientists, they didn’t scream out their findings in impassioned prose. They were cool and calm—but there was no mistaking what they were saying.
An Elsevier journal has denied the efforts of a group of researchers — well, most of them, anyway — to reverse a retraction after having agreed to the move in the first place.
The dispute centers on a 2018 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports titled “Association between low-testosterone and kidney stones in US men: The national health and nutrition examination survey 2011–2012” — which, as the title implies, found that:
Why is it so difficult to correct the scientific record in sports science? In the first installment in this series of guest posts, Matthew Tenan, a data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience, began the story of how he and some colleagues came to scrutinize a paper. In the second, he explained what happened next. In today’s final installment, he reflects on the editors’ response and what he thinks it means for his field.
In refusing to retract the Dankel and Loenneke manuscript we showed to be mathematically flawed, the editors referred to “feedback from someone with greater expertise” and included the following:
Why is it so difficult to correct the scientific record in sports science? In the first installment in this series of guest posts, Matthew Tenan, a data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience, began the story of how he and some colleagues came to scrutinize a paper. In this post, he explains what happened next.
Two years ago, following heated debate, a sports science journal banned a statistical method from its pages, and a different journal — which had published a defense of that method earlier — decided to boost its statistical chops. But as Matthew Tenan, a data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience relates in this three-part series, that doesn’t seem to have made it any easier to correct the scientific record. Here’s part one.
As it happened, I knew that paper, and I had also expressed concerns about it – when I reviewed it before publication as one of the members of the journal’s editorial board. Indeed, I was brought on to the editorial board of Sports Medicine because the journal had recently received a lot of bad press for publishing a paper about another “novel statistical method” with significant issues and I had been a vocal critic of the sports medicine and sport science field developing their own statistical methods that are not used outside of the field and validated by the wider statistics community.
A group of pharmacology researchers in Japan have now lost four papers over concerns about the validity of their data.
The studies come from a group at Kobe Gakuin University, which conducted a misconduct investigation into the articles last year and concluded that 10 papers were affected. (Note: The report is in Japanese and does not identify the person or persons responsible for the deception.)
Among the latest to be retracted is a 2012 article in the Journal of Natural Medicines titled “Honokiol suppresses the development of post-ischemic glucose intolerance and neuronal damage in mice.”
Manipulated peer review strikes again, this time with a 2015 article whose authors appear to have created a straw mathematician to make their work seem more legit.
The paper, “Fixed point theorems and explicit estimates for convergence rates of continuous time Markov chains,” appeared in Fixed Point Theory and Applications, a Springer Nature title.
Its authors, purportedly, were affiliated with institutions in China and Japan. According to the acknowledgements for the article:
A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move
a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.
