When someone has to retract a paper for misconduct, what are the odds they will do it again? And how can we use that information to stop repeat offenders? Those are the questions that Toshio Kuroki of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Akira Ukawa of RIKEN set out to tackle in … Continue reading How often do scientists who commit misconduct do it again?
Title: Tranexamic Acid in Patients Undergoing Coronary-Artery Surgery What Caught Our Attention: When the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) publishes a correction that is more than a misspelling of a name, we take a look. When NEJM publishes a 500-word correction to the data in a highly cited article, we take notice. This study … Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Big journal, big correction
Psychiatry journals have retracted two papers evaluating a schizophrenia drug after a university in Japan flagged issues, such as a lack of written informed consent. The papers—published in Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical & Experimental in 2012 and Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in 2014—examined the safety and effectiveness of an antipsychotic drug in patients with schizophrenia. According … Continue reading Uni dings schizophrenia studies for problems with informed consent, other flaws
A journal has retracted a paper on a controversial course of treatment used to stunt the growth of disabled children, at the request of the human research ethics committee at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The paper described the so-called Ashley Treatment — explored last week in the New York Times — in which disabled … Continue reading Ethics committee asks journal to retract paper about controversial growth-stunting treatment
An incorrect proof has felled a math paper. There’s not too much to say in a straightforward situation like this one, which we’ve seen before — the result of honest errors, not any malfeasance. Here’s the abstract for “Spectral mapping theorem for generalized Kato spectrum:” In this paper, we give an affirmative answer to Mbekhta’s conjecture (Mbekhta, … Continue reading Honest errors take down math paper
Ever since we broke the news about the issues with the now-retracted Science paper about changing people’s minds on gay marriage, we’ve been the subject of a lot of press coverage, which has in turn led a number of people to ask us: Who has the most retractions? Well, we’ve tried to answer that in … Continue reading Who has the most retractions? Introducing the Retraction Watch leaderboard
Who has the most retractions? Here’s our unofficial list (see notes on methodology), which we’ll update as more information comes to light: Joachim Boldt (213) See also: Editors-in-chief statement, our coverage Yoshitaka Fujii (172) See also: Final report of investigating committee, our reporting, additional coverage Hironobu Ueshima (124) See also: our coverage Yoshihiro Sato (122) … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Leaderboard
Two researchers at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada have retracted a paper that came to fairly common-sense conclusions about bike safety. In the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Transport and Health, the authors concluded that slippery road surfaces, night-time biking, and higher speed limits were all associated with higher probabilities of a … Continue reading Stats mistake crashes bike accident paper
Nature, as we and others have noticed, has had what Paul Knoepfler referred to as a “torrent” of retractions in the past two years. That torrent — 13 research papers — has prompted a welcome and soul-searching editorial, as it did in 2010 when the journal had what it called an “unusually large number” of … Continue reading Nature, facing “considerable rise” in retractions, blames lawyers for opaque and delayed notices
The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has ruled in a case we’ve been following for nearly two years — and which seems to have been launched after Retraction Watch readers took a careful look at figures from what appeared to be an unrelated case. Takao Takahashi and Makato Suzuki, both former postdocs at a cancer … Continue reading Former UT-Southwestern cancer researchers faked data in 10 papers: ORI