A journal has issued an expression of concern over a 2018 paper which involved strapping 21 anesthetized minipigs to sleds and running them into a wall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.
The study, “Experimental study of thoracoabdominal injuries suffered from caudocephalad impacts using pigs,” came from the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China, and was funded by the People’s Liberation Army.
About those impacts. The purpose of the study, according to the abstract, was this:
The retraction earlier this month of a 2016 paper in the American Naturalist by Kate Laskowski and Jonathan Pruitt turns out to be the tip of what is potentially a very large iceberg.
This week, the researchers have retracted a second paper, this one in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for the same reasons — duplicated data without a reasonable explanation.
Dan Bolnick, the editor of the American Naturalist, tells us:
A study spanning dozens of years, four deceased authors and a retraction for duplicate publication. Sounds like a recipe for an episode of that new show about medical detectives (not epidemiologists; detectives with guns).
We’d like to be able to explain, but, well, we can’t. What we do know is that the authors of a 2019 article about the role of aluminum in neurologic disease have retracted their paper because it’s a duplicate of an article some of them had published in 2018. But that’s as clear as things get.
Here’s the retraction notice, which, like any good mystery, is full of question marks:
The Journal of Consumer Research has retracted a 2019 paper because it overlapped significantly with a study previously published in Chinese by the same authors.
But whether both authors agreed to the previous submission is a subject of some confusion on the part of one of them.
The journal, published by Oxford Academic, added “RETRACTED” to the beginning of the paper’s title, “Sorry by Size: How the Number of Apologizers Affects Apology Effectiveness,” but did not include a retraction notice, nor any other explanation. The notice, second author Sam Maglio, of the University of Toronto, told Retraction Watch, will read:
The authors of a 2018 paper on how much carbon soil can store have retracted the work after concluding that their analysis was fatally flawed.
The article, “Soil carbon stocks are underestimated in mountainous regions,” appeared in the journal Geoderma. Its authors are affiliated with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.
The other day, we reported on the retraction this month of a paper that was laid low by reuse of experimental materials — cheese cloth, to be exact — when fresh were required.
At the time, we asked the senior author, Donghai Wang, of Kansas State University, whether any other articles from his group had similar problems. Wang’s response was no — but it turns out the group already had five other retractions in December, and has requested another.
All are from the same journal, Bioresource Technology.
These retractions include the August 2019 paper titled “A study on the association between biomass types and magnesium oxide pretreatment.” According to the notice:
Some Retraction Watch readers may recall that back in 2012, we called, in The Scientist, for the creation of a Transparency Index. Over the years, we’ve had occasional interest from others in that concept, and some good critiques, but we noted at the time that we did not have the bandwidth to create it ourselves. We hoped that it would plant seeds for others, whether directly or indirectly.
Science seems to publish many things that may be true or interesting — but perhaps not both. Ideally all of science should be both true and interesting, and if we were to choose one, my hope would be to choose true over interesting.
