A group of Swiss neurologists have lost their 2013 article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience after reporting that their data were rendered null by coding errors. The article, “Spontaneous pre-stimulus fluctuations in the activity of right fronto-parietal areas influence inhibitory control performance,” purported to find that:
In the midst of the holiday season, it’s a pleasure to be able to share the story of a scientist doing the right thing at significant professional cost — especially a researcher in psychology, a field that has been battered lately by scandal. Sometime after publishing two papers — one in Developmental Science and another … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Yale psychology lab retracts monkey papers for inaccurate coding
Okay, so great speechifying isn’t always recognized the first time it’s heard. We’re sure “I Have a Dream” had its detractors at the time. And Homer probably put more than his share of listeners to sleep while reciting the Iliad (that sucker’s LONG, after all). But when the Patriot & Union, of Pennsylvania, trashed Lincoln’s … Continue reading Doing the right thing, 150 years later: Paper retracts editorial condemning Gettysburg Address as “silly”
We’ve always like to highlight cases in which scientists do the right thing and retract problematic papers themselves, rather than being forced to by editors and publishers. Apparently, according to a new paper by economists and management scholars, scientists reward that sort of behavior, too. The study by Benjamin Jones of the Kellogg School of … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Scientists reward authors who report their own errors, says study
We’ll say it again: We like being able to point out when researchers stand up and do the right thing, even at personal cost. In December 2011, Pamela C. Ronald, of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues published a paper in PLOS ONE,”Small Protein-Mediated Quorum Sensing in a Gram-Negative Bacterium.” Such quorum sensing research … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Researchers retract quorum sensing paper after public process
What do you do when new experiments show that you interpreted the data from your old experiments the wrong way? Some scientists might just shrug and sweep those errors — and their previous papers — under the rug. But when it happened to Jeffery Kelly, of the Scripps Research Institute, and his colleagues, they decided … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Researchers retract two studies when they realize they misinterpreted data
Amid an ongoing investigation, a group of psychology researchers at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium have taken a painful decision to retract a paper now that they’ve realized there were serious problems with one aspect of the work. Here’s the notice for “The Emergence of Orthographic Word Representations in the Brain: Evaluating … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Psychology researchers retract after realizing data “were not analyzed properly”
For the second time inside of a week, we come to praise scientists who did the right thing when they realized their lab equipment or reagents weren’t performing as expected. Here’s the retraction of a 2011 paper in Cerebral Cortex:
In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already. Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.
The Internet of Things. Computer science. Botany. COVID-19. All worthwhile subjects, to be sure. But what do they have to do with materials science? That’s what James Heathers, who will be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch as a “data thug,” found himself wondering after he spent a weekend looking into articles published by Materials Today: … Continue reading Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?