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.
According to the abstract of the paper:
Continue reading Digging deeper: Authors retract soil paper so “the error we made does not propagate”
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:
Continue reading Group that reused cheese cloth in different experiments up to six retractions
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.
With that in mind, we present a guest post from Anita Bandrowski, who among other things leads an initiative designed to help researchers identify their reagents correctly and has written for Retraction Watch before. She and colleagues have just posted a preprint titled “Rigor and Transparency Index, a new metric of quality for assessing biological and medical science methods” in which they describe “an automated tool developed to review the methods sections of manuscripts for the presence of criteria associated with the NIH and other reporting guidelines.”
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.
Continue reading Has reproducibility improved? Introducing the Transparency and Rigor Index
The International Journal of Sport Psychology has retracted a paper by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, whose work has faced doubts since the early 1990s.
The paper, published in 1990, was one of dozens by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek found to be “unsafe” by King’s College London, but appears to be the first to be retracted.
Here’s the abstract of “Psychological factors as determinants of success in football and boxing: The effects of behaviour therapy”:
Continue reading Journal retracts 30-year-old paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck
In journalism, we often joke that three cases of a phenomenon is a trend. If that’s the case, the trend of late 2019 and early 2020 would appear to be authors announcing retractions on Twitter.
In December, Joscha Legewie took to social media to say he had been made aware of an error that had caused him to retract a just-published paper on police shootings and the health of black infants. Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold did something similar just a few weeks ago.
And now, the authors of a 2016 study on the social networks of spiders have retracted the paper after finding irreconcilable problems with their data — and the first author tweeted about it.
In doing so, she was following in the foosteps of the editor in chief of the journal that published the paper, who had himself retracted a paper several years ago. Read on for more.
Continue reading ‘I’m starting the year off with something I didn’t expect to ever do: I’m retracting a paper.’
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: An ugly fight in nutrition research; embezzling scientists; eyebrow-raising papers in China
The journal Diabetes has retracted two 2006 papers by a group of researchers in Germany whose work has long been the subject of concerns about image duplication and manipulation.
The first author of the articles is Kathrin Maedler, a prominent diabetes specialist at the University of Bremen, where she’d been a named professor but lost the title over the affair. Maedler’s group now has four retractions resulting from problematic figures.
The University of Bremen in 2016 found insufficient evidence that Maedler committed research misconduct, but concluded that she was negligent. Maedler at the time told us:
Continue reading Tired of waiting for a university, a publisher commissions its own investigation — and retracts two papers
A group of researchers in France has lost a 2019 paper in Cell Calcium because one of the authors took, um, a bit too much inspiration for the work from a manuscript he’d reviewed for another publication.
The article, “TRPV6 calcium channel regulation, downstream pathways, and therapeutic targeting in cancer,” was written by a team from the Laboratory of Excellence Ion Channel Science and Therapeutics at the University of Lille. The senior author of the paper was V’yacheslav Lehen’kyi.
Or, maybe it was John Stewart, of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.
As the retraction notice states:
Continue reading Author ‘still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity’ after a reviewer steals his work
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has found a former post-doc at the University of Massachusetts Medical School guilty of misconduct stemming from falsification of data.
The finding comes more than two years after a retraction referred to an investigation at U Mass. The ORI said Ozgur Tataroglu, who worked as a neurobiologist at the institution, doctored data in a published paper and two federal grant proposals. The 2015 paper, which appeared in Cell, was retracted in 2017. Tataroglu refused to sign the notice, which stated:
Continue reading Former UMass post-doc faked data, says federal watchdog
Until this year, only one researcher — Yoshitaka Fujii — had eclipsed the century mark for retractions. But Fujii can no longer claim dibs on being the only scientist to lose three digits worth of papers.
Joachim Boldt, a fellow anesthesiologist fraudster, recently notched three more retractions, bringing his tally, by our count, to an even 100.
Boldt was one of Europe’s leading anesthesiologists for decades. A critical care specialist, he was internationally known for his work on the use of substances called volume expanders that are used during surgery to preserve blood pressure. That fame was replaced in the early part of the last decade by questions about his work, and findings of misconduct.
Continue reading Anesthesiologist joins the 100-retraction club
