The week at Retraction Watch featured the appeal of a modern-day retraction, and a look at whether a retraction by a Nobel Prize winner should be retracted 50 years later. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Ever wonder why, on a round-trip, the leg home often feels shorter? A group of researchers found that’s only true in hindsight, as people look back on which leg felt shorter — the trouble is, when the paper first appeared, the title mistakenly stated the opposite was true. One June 10, PLOS ONE published a … Continue reading When the title states the wrong result, a paper gets corrected
In 2005, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced that obesity researcher Eric Poehlman had committed misconduct in 10 published papers. You might think that all of those ten articles would have been retracted a decade later. You’d be wrong. Only six of them have. Here’s what Elizabeth Wager (a member of the board of directors of The … Continue reading How long does it take to retract a paper? A look at the Eric Poehlman record
Thanks to some eagle-eyed readers, we’ve been alerted to some corrections for high profile stem cell scientist Jacob Hanna that we had missed, bringing our count to one retraction and 13 errata on 10 papers. The problems in the work range from duplications of images, to inadvertent deletions in figures, to failures by his co-authors to disclose … Continue reading Stem cell researcher Jacob Hanna’s correction count updated to 10
PLOS One has retracted a paper that links the most commonly used herbicide to ADHD, after it was “published in error.” According to the note, the paper was “editorially rejected following peer review and consultation with the Editorial Board,” but ended up going through the production process anyway. When we contacted the authors, they filled us in … Continue reading A mess: PLOS mistakenly publishes rejected ADHD-herbicide paper, retracts it
A review paper that suggested the degenerative brain disease that’s striking former football players may not be tied to contact sports has been corrected to reveal the first author spent decades working for the National Football League. The correction appears in a review in PLOS ONE about chronic traumatic encephalopathy – the degenerative brain disease that was the … Continue reading Author’s ties to NFL lead to correction for review that cast doubt on brain risk from sports
This week at Retraction Watch featured a look at the nuances of replication efforts, aka “the replication paradox,” as well as yet another story of fake peer reviews, this time at Hindawi. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Here at Retraction Watch, we are reminded every day that everybody (including us) makes mistakes — what matters is, how you handle yourself when it happens. That’s why we created a “doing the right thing” category, to flag incidents where scientists have owned up to their errors and taken steps to correct them. We’re not suggesting … Continue reading The consequences of retraction: Do scientists forgive and forget?
A new study suggests that much of what we think about misconduct — including the idea that it is linked to the unrelenting pressure on scientists to publish high-profile papers — is incorrect. In a new paper out today in PLOS ONE [see update at end of post], Daniele Fanelli, Rodrigo Costas, and Vincent Larivière performed a retrospective analysis of … Continue reading Pressure to publish not to blame for misconduct, says new study
We’ve written quite a lot about the perks and pitfalls of the peer review system, but one thing we never really touched on was the risk that a reviewer might be … well, not to put too fine a point on it: a dope. But Fiona Ingleby can speak to that. Ingleby, a postdoc in … Continue reading It’s a man’s world — for one peer reviewer, at least