There’s a new paper about retractions, and it’s chock-full of the kind of data that we love to geek out on. Enjoy.
The new paper, “A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact,” appears on the preprint server arXiv — meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed — and is co-authored by Xin Shuai and five other employees of Thomson Reuters. Highlights from their dataset: Continue reading Ready to geek out on retraction data? Read this new preprint
Scientists have been abuzz over a report in last week’s Science questioning the results of a recent landmark effort to replicate 100 published studies in top psychology journals. The critique of this effort – which suggested the authors couldn’t replicate most of the research because they didn’t adhere closely enough to the original studies – was debated in many outlets, including Nature, The New York Times, and Wired. Below, two of the authors of the original reproducibility project — Brian Nosek and Elizabeth Gilbert – use the example of one replicated study to show why it is important to describe accurately the nature of a study in order to assess whether the differences from the original should be considered consequential. In fact, they argue, that one of the purposes of replication is to help assess whether differences presumed to be irrelevant are actually irrelevant, all of which brings us closer to the truth. Continue reading Let’s not mischaracterize replication studies: authors
A promising early career researcher has been dismissed from her post at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) in Spain, following “an alleged ongoing fraud,” according to El Pais.
We don’t know what exactly the internal investigation into Susana González’s work found; El Pais relied on anonymous sources, and the CNIC confirmed only that they dismissed her on February 29th. There are allegations against her work on PubPeer, but we don’t know what role those played in the investigation.
(We had the story translated; here’s a PDF of the article in English.)
González denies that she committed misconduct, the paper reports:
Continue reading Stem cell researcher in Spain dismissed following investigation
After reading too many papers that either are not reproducible or contain statistical errors (or both), the American Statistical Association (ASA) has been roused to action. Today the group released six principles for the use and interpretation of p values. P-values are used to search for differences between groups or treatments, to evaluate relationships between variables of interest, and for many other purposes. But the ASA says they are widely misused. Here are the six principles from the ASA statement: Continue reading We’re using a common statistical test all wrong. Statisticians want to fix that.
The week at Retraction Watch was dominated by the retraction of “the Creator” paper, but we also reported on a scientist under investigation losing a grant, and a case brewing at a New Jersey university. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Replication debate heats up again; NEJM fooled?; how to boost your alt-metrics
Pernille Rørth is not your typical novelist. She was a scientist for 25 years and was also editor-in-chief of the EMBO Journal for five years. But now, she’s written a novel – Raw Data – about an incident of misconduct that forces a top lab in Boston to retract a prominent Nature paper. The novel exposes how scientists – even the most well-intentioned – can crack under the intense pressure of such a career-killing event. (There’s even a twist at the end.) We spoke to Rørth about her novel, and what she wants it to achieve.
Retraction Watch: Misconduct is – thankfully – a relatively rare event in science. Why write a novel about it? Continue reading When misconduct strikes: A fictional tale
The scientific community has been abuzz the last few days after some readers discovered language mentioning “the Creator” in a PLOS ONE paper about hand biomechanics — hours after which, the journal promptly retracted the paper.
But not everyone agrees with that decision. In one comment thread attached to the paper, a writer claiming to be an author says the language was a translation mistake, and was a reference to Nature, not God — and, as a result, asks the journal to correct (not retract) the paper. Others, such as blogger “dr24hours,” agree.
So what do you think, readers? Should PLOS ONE have retracted “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living?” Take our poll below. Continue reading Poll: Should “the Creator” paper have been retracted?
PLOS ONE has retracted a paper published one month ago after readers began criticizing it for mentioning “the Creator.”
The article “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living” now includes a reader comment from PLOS Staff, noting: Continue reading PLOS ONE retracting paper that cites “the Creator”
Approximately six out of 10 economics studies published in the field’s most reputable journals — American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics — are replicable, according to a study published today in Science.
The authors repeated the results of 18 papers published between 2011 and 2014 and found 11 — approximately 61% — lived up to their claims. But the study found the replicated effect to be on average only 66% of that reported in the earlier studies, which suggests that authors of the original papers may have exaggerated the trends they reported.
Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who co-authored the study, “Evaluating replicability of laboratory experiments in economics,” told us: Continue reading More than half of top-tier economics papers are replicable, study finds
Plant scientist Jorge Vivanco has earned his seventh retraction, after an investigation found data from soil samples were “intentionally fabricated by a third party.”
Vivanco and his former postdoc Harsh Bais made a name for themselves by discovering the secret behind a nasty invasive plant: It secretes a harmful form of catechin, which kills everything around it, suggesting it could serve as a new herbicide. The findings earned the researchers a story in the New York Times.
In the newly retracted paper, published in 2005, first author Laura Perry — then a postdoc at Colorado State University — further explored the role of the plant-killer, working with Vivanco as the last author. However, when a team working in the building next door had trouble finding catechin in their samples, Perry took another look, and concluded that her samples had been tampered with.
In other words, Perry told us: Continue reading Sample tampering leads to plant scientist’s 7th retraction