When — and how — should journals flag papers that don’t quite meet retraction criteria?

Readers of Retraction Watch will be no strangers to the practice of issuing Expressions of Concern — editorial notices from journals that indicate a paper’s results may not be valid. While a good idea in theory — so readers can be aware of potential issues while an investigation is underway — in practice, it’s a somewhat flawed system. As we (and others before us) have shown, so-called EOCs can linger indefinitely, leaving researchers unsure how to interpret a flagged paper.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) agrees that the system has room for improvement. Although COPE has included advice on when to issue EOCs within its retraction guidelines, it has allotted time in the next COPE Forum (Feb 26) to discuss the topic. Some questions it’s considering:

Continue reading When — and how — should journals flag papers that don’t quite meet retraction criteria?

Weekend reads: We’re back! (We hope); the data thugs; heroes of retraction

As many of our readers will know, we’ve been having serious technical issues with the site. We’re cautiously optimistic that they’ve been solved, so although we’re still working on fixes, we’re going to try posting again. Thanks for your ongoing patience.

This week, we posted at our sister site, Embargo Watch. Here are those posts:

And here’s what’s been happening elsewhere over the past few weeks: Continue reading Weekend reads: We’re back! (We hope); the data thugs; heroes of retraction

“Major advance” in solar power retracted for reproducibility issues

The authors of a highly cited 2016 research letter on a way to improve the efficiency of solar panels have retracted their work following “concerns about the reproducibility.”

Given the potential importance of the data, it would be nice to know what exactly went wrong, and why. However, the retraction notice doesn’t provide many details, and doesn’t even specify if the authors did indeed fail to reproduce the data.

The letter, titled “Graded bandgap perovskite solar cells,” was published in Nature Materials by a group out of the University of California at Berkeley and the affiliated Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The 2016 article has been cited 16 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it the ranking of “highly cited.”

Berkeley heralded the findings in a press release as a “major advance” in the field of solar energy:

Continue reading “Major advance” in solar power retracted for reproducibility issues

Should a journal retract a paper the authors didn’t know contained bad data?

A medical journal has retracted a 2016 paper over a series of errors, prompting it to lose faith in the paper overall. The authors have objected to the decision, arguing the errors weren’t their fault and could be revised with a correction — rather than retracting what they consider “an important contribution” to an ongoing debate in medicine.

The paper explored the so-called weekend effect—that patients admitted to the emergency department on the weekend are more likely to die than those admitted on a weekday. Whether the weekend effect is real is not clear. Some studies have supported the phenomenon in certain areas of medicine, but others (including the now-retracted paper) have failed to find an effect.

First author Mohammed A. Mohammed, based at the University of Bradford in the UK, told Retraction Watch that the errors were introduced by one of the hospitals that provided them the data:

Continue reading Should a journal retract a paper the authors didn’t know contained bad data?

Author retracts Nature paper on Asia’s glaciers flagged for data error

A glacier researcher has retracted a Nature paper after mistakenly underestimating glacial melt by as much as a factor of ten.

In September, the journal tagged “Asia’s glaciers are a regionally important buffer against drought,” originally published in May 2017 by Hamish Pritchard,a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, with an expression of concern, notifying readers of the mistake. It turns out, Pritchard had missed the fine print on a data set; a figure he thought represented water loss over a decade covered, in fact, only a year.

In September, Pritchard told Retraction Watch that the mix-up strengthened his argument that glacial melt was important to Asia’s water supply.

However, in the retraction notice, published today, he indicated that the mistake affected other conclusions: Continue reading Author retracts Nature paper on Asia’s glaciers flagged for data error

Six days after publication, paper is flagged. By day 11, it’s retracted.

Authors of a 2018 paper have retracted it after discovering “the conclusions in the article cannot be relied upon.”

The journal, PeerJ, wasted no time. Less than a week after the paper was published, the journal issued an expression of concern to alert readers to the issue and to the forthcoming retraction notice, which appeared five days later, on January 23.

Journals can take months, even years, to retract a paper. In this case, the time from publication to retraction was 11 days. The records, best we can tell, are 48 hours and 80 years.

PeerJ is typically associated with preprints—which the journal defines as “a draft that has not yet been peer reviewed for formal publication”—but the 2018 paper was never a preprint, the publisher said. The paper was peer reviewed, after the authors submitted it last October.

So, what prompted such a speedy retraction? Continue reading Six days after publication, paper is flagged. By day 11, it’s retracted.

“The sampling had been compromised:” MD Anderson researchers retract cancer study

Erich Sturgis

Researchers from the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center have retracted a 2015 paper after they discovered their samples had been compromised.

Exactly how the samples were compromised, and how and when the researchers found out, remains unclear.

Originally published March 30, 2015, in Cancer, “Genome-wide association study identifies common genetic variants associated with salivary gland carcinoma and its subtypes” reported that at least three protein-coding gene variants were associated with rare salivary gland cancers. In the paper, the authors — all but one of whom are affiliated with MD Anderson — cautioned that they still needed to confirm the findings and figure out the mechanism by which the genes might increase the risk of cancer.

On Oct. 23, 2017, the researchers asked the journal to either correct or withdraw the paper. According to the retraction notice issued Jan. 9, the researchers had discovered: Continue reading “The sampling had been compromised:” MD Anderson researchers retract cancer study

Most board members of journal resign to protest new editor, layoffs

Detlev Ganten

Nearly all of the editorial board members of a 150-year-old journal about the molecular underpinnings of medicine and disease have resigned their posts, protesting changes by publisher SpringerNature that they say “jeopardized the future and scholarly legacy of the Journal.”

In a December 1 letter, led by the three former editors in chief of the Journal of Molecular Medicine — Detlev Ganten, Gregg Semenza and Thomas Sommer — more than 70 then-editorial board members raised two objections: closing a small editorial office and laying off staff, and unilaterally appointing a new editor.

Regarding the decision to close the office at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin Buch, where it has been since 1995,  the editors and board members wrote: Continue reading Most board members of journal resign to protest new editor, layoffs

Caught Our Notice: Brian Wansink issues correction that’s longer than original paper

Title: Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools

What Caught Our Attention: One thing can be said for the corrections for Brian Wansink‘s papers — they aren’t short.  After James Heathers outlined some of his concerns about the highly cited study back in March, 2017, the journal has issued a correction, and it’s longer (1636 words) than the original, highly cited paper (1401 words). Some of the changes include explaining the children studied were preschoolers (3-5 years old), not preteens (8-11), as originally claimed. (It may be hard to imagine how the authors could make such a mistake, but they did it once before, in another retracted paper.) Even with all those words explaining the correction — we’re only including an excerpt of the entire notice below — some concerns still remain: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Brian Wansink issues correction that’s longer than original paper

MD Anderson: No, we did not co-sponsor this cancer conference

Bharat Aggarwal

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, of Houston, is asking a conference on cancer in Chennai, India to stop claiming it is a co-sponsor.

The meeting was the subject of a story in The New Indian Express, which reported that Baba Ramdev, a prominent yogi “who had claimed that cancer is divine justice for sins committed,” would be the chief guest at the meeting. Ramdev is scheduled to address the conference for 45 minutes this Thursday, its opening day.

As the story noted, one of the organizers of the meeting is Bharat Aggarwal, a former MD Anderson faculty member who has had to retract 18 papers, mostly for image manipulation.

I raised concerns about the conference yesterday (Sunday) on Twitter. MD Anderson responded within hours to say first that they were looking into the matter, and then to say that while it had sponsored the conference in the past, it was not sponsoring it this year: Continue reading MD Anderson: No, we did not co-sponsor this cancer conference