Search Results for: doing the right thing

Announcing the DiRT Award, a new “doing the right thing” prize — and its first recipient

It takes a lot of work to clean up the scientific literature, and some researchers and organizations deserve special recognition. That’s why we’ve established a “doing the right thing” category when we see praise-worthy progress in individual retractions, and have now gone a step further: We’ve created the DiRT Award, a new annual prize to … Continue reading Announcing the DiRT Award, a new “doing the right thing” prize — and its first recipient

Doing the right thing: Authors pull psych review after finding inaccuracies

Two psychology researchers are retracting a meta-analysis after discovering errors they believe may affect the conclusions. We’re giving this a “doing the right thing” nod, as last author Pankaj Patel of Villanova University in Pennsylvania contacted us about his plan to retract the paper, and resubmit for publication once he and co-author Sherry Thatcher — at the University … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Authors pull psych review after finding inaccuracies

Doing the right thing: Authors share data, retract when colleague finds error

A pair of chemical engineers has retracted a paper after another researcher was unable to replicate their work, in a case that we consider an example of doing the right thing. Dennis Prieve, at Carnegie Mellon University, was interested in applying the paper — on how systems of molecules known as “reverse micelles” conduct electrical charge — to his own … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Authors share data, retract when colleague finds error

Doing the right thing: Authors retract PNAS paper when new experiments show “conclusion was incorrect”

Researchers in Sweden and Australia have retracted a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after follow-up experiments disproved their conclusions. Here’s the notice for “Dominant suppression of inflammation by glycan-hydrolyzed IgG,” which is signed by all nine of the paper’s authors:

Doing the right thing: Particle physicists pull paper after equation collides with the truth

Three physicists at Imperial College London have retracted a paper on Coulomb collisions, a kind of fender bender between two charged particles, after realizing their equations were written wrong. The mistake resulted in an erroneous conclusion about the strength of the collisions. Here’s the notice for “Effects of Large-Angle Coulomb Collisions on Inertial Confinement Fusion Plasmas”:

Doing the right thing: Physicists retract paper after becoming aware of “a fundamental error”

The authors of a paper in Physical Review Letters have retracted it, after another researcher pointed out a mistake. F. Sattin and D.F. Escande write in the notice for “Alfvénic Propagation: A Key to Nonlocal Effects in Magnetized Plasmas” (which is behind a paywall) that after the paper was published, they “we became aware of … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Physicists retract paper after becoming aware of “a fundamental error”

Doing the right thing: Authors retract lubricant paper whose findings they can’t reproduce

The journal Wear — an Elsevier title, not a Condé Nast fashion magazine — has retracted a paper by a pair of Chinese physicists after the researchers were unable to replicate their findings. The 2009 article, “Microstructure and tribological characterizations of Ni based self-lubricating coating,” was written by authors from the MOE Key Laboratory for … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Authors retract lubricant paper whose findings they can’t reproduce

Doing the right thing: Journal clears unknowing author of plagiarism

Here’s a nice case of a journal taking pains to clear the name of an author. Last summer we wrote about a case of plagiarism involving two authors from India who’d published a paper on biometrics in the Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences. Now — seven months later, we’ll note — one of those authors … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Journal clears unknowing author of plagiarism

Doing the right thing: Authors retract protein paper after finding experimental errors

A group of researchers in the Netherlands has retracted a paper once they realized that the findings weren’t reproducible and that there had been an error in the experiments. Here’s the notice for “Ubiquitin‐specific protease 4 is inhibited by its ubiquitin‐like domain,” by MP Luna‐Vargas, AC Faesen, WJ van Dijk, M Rape, A Fish, and … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Authors retract protein paper after finding experimental errors

Doing the right thing: Team finds data merge error in depression paper, retracts

A team of neuroscientists from Sweden has retracted their 2013 paper in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity after discovering that they’d made a mistake while merging their data. According to the abstract, the study, “Lower CSF interleukin-6 predicts future depression in a population-based sample of older women followed for 17 years,” purported to find that: