Weekend reads: Tenured professor in Illinois fired; should journals publish CRISPR babies paper?; retracted vaccine-autism paper reappears

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 a retraction for a prominent psychologist at Cornell, more than a dozen retractions for a former cardiac stem cell lab at Harvard, and a planned correction for a paper about academic career lifespans that earned a lot of news coverage. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: Tenured professor in Illinois fired; should journals publish CRISPR babies paper?; retracted vaccine-autism paper reappears

Two years after he shared a draft of a “random brain fart side-project,” an astronomer sees a version published — without his name

Peter Yoachim

In 2015, Peter Yoachim became interested in how long astronomers remained active astronomers or, more to the point, how long they continued publishing in astronomy.

Yoachim, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, dug into some data, “did a burst of work in late 2015/early 2016, then fizzled out by 2017 when I ran out of time to work on it.” As he told Retraction Watch: Continue reading Two years after he shared a draft of a “random brain fart side-project,” an astronomer sees a version published — without his name

Political scientist asks for correction, gets flip-flop

Ryan Enos

You’d think that if an author asked a journal to correct a modest mistake, the journal would oblige. After all, many researchers have to be dragged kicking and screaming to correct the record.

But for Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, self-correction of a paper he had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) took far more steps than one might have hoped. Continue reading Political scientist asks for correction, gets flip-flop

Anversa cardiac stem cell lab earns 13 retractions

Piero Anversa

Two months after Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital said they were requesting the retraction of more than 30 papers from a former cardiac stem cell lab there, two American Heart Association journals have retracted more than a dozen papers from the lab.

Yesterday, Circulation retracted three papers, and Circulation Research retracted 10. All 13 were among 15 subjected to expressions of concern last month. Continue reading Anversa cardiac stem cell lab earns 13 retractions

Indiana University paper about lung transplantation retracted after misconduct finding

After a finding of data manipulation, the corresponding author of a 2014 paper by a team of researchers at Indiana University has retracted the work.

Here’s the notice in Science Translational Medicine: Continue reading Indiana University paper about lung transplantation retracted after misconduct finding

It’s time to get serious about decreasing bias in the clinical literature. Here’s one way to do that.

Tom Jefferson

Recently, we wrote in STAT about the “research integrity czars” that some journals are hiring to catch misconduct and errors. But are there other ways that journals could ensure the integrity of the scientific record? Tom Jefferson, a physician, methods researcher, and campaigner for open clinical trial data, has a suggestion, which he explores in this guest post. (Jefferson’s disclosures are here.)

Readers of Retraction Watch know that the quality control mechanisms in the publication of science, chiefly editorial peer review, are not infallible. Peer review in biomedicine in its current form and practice is the direct descendant of the bedside consultation. In a consultation the object or person under observation (patient/the journal submission) is observed and analyzed by the doctor (editor) who decides what the best course of action is. If unsure, the physician/editor may call on the help of outside specialists (the hospital physicians/referees) to help make a final decision on the therapy and fate of the patient/submission.

Such a wonderfully genteel paradigm of scrutiny and scholarly activity cannot be expected to identify problems caused by the contemporary rampant commercialization of biomedical research and its dissemination. In fact it does not. In fact, the system as designed does little, if anything, to detect these issues. Continue reading It’s time to get serious about decreasing bias in the clinical literature. Here’s one way to do that.

Prominent psychologist at Cornell notches second retraction

Robert Sternberg

Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, whose work has been cited more than 140,000 times, has had a second paper retracted because he duplicated his previous work.

Sternberg’s work came under scrutiny earlier this year when colleagues said he was citing himself at a high rate, and not doing enough to encourage diversity in psychology research. He resigned as editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, and around the same time, Brendan O’Connor, at the University of Leicester in the UK posted allegations on Twitter that Sternberg had been recycling his work, after O’Connor analyzed the material with Nick Brown.

Sternberg’s first retraction appeared in June in School Psychology International. Here’s the new one, in Theory Into Practice: Continue reading Prominent psychologist at Cornell notches second retraction

Weekend reads: Prominent doctors who don’t disclose conflicts, and the journals that enable them; a “nudge” study faces scrutiny

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 two new names on our leaderboard, vindication for The Joy of Cooking, and a retraction for an antibiotic switcheroo. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Prominent doctors who don’t disclose conflicts, and the journals that enable them; a “nudge” study faces scrutiny

Authors try to duplicate bad data, fail miserably

Cangaroojack via Flickr

We’ve seen plagiarizers plagiarizing plagiarizers, but here’s what seems to be a first: A journal has retracted an article that duplicated text…from a paper that had been retracted for containing dubious data.

The Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Science published the recycled paper, titled “Development and in vitro-in vivo characterization of chronomodulated multi-particulate drug delivery system of terbutaline sulphate for treatment of nocturnal asthma by box–Behnken statistical design.” The authors were from several institutions in India.

As the retraction notice explains: Continue reading Authors try to duplicate bad data, fail miserably

Researchers retract PNAS paper when they realize they’d been victims of an antibiotic switcheroo

Gentamicin B1, via PubChem

In March 2017, a group of researchers in Vancouver, along with a colleague in Philadelphia,  published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluding that a particular antibiotic might be useful for treating conditions in people with rare mutations.

Then, this past July, while continuing the work, they had an unexpected result. That made them suspect that the antibiotic they thought they had ordered, gentamicin, wasn’t what they thought it was. With the help of a different company that sells the antibiotic, they confirmed they were studying a different compound — and retracted the paper.

Here’s the notice for “Gentamicin B1 is a minor gentamicin component with major nonsense mutation suppression activity:” Continue reading Researchers retract PNAS paper when they realize they’d been victims of an antibiotic switcheroo