Retraction Watch

New York Times says it “would not have assigned” elephant article to writer had they known of conflict

Although we nearly always stick to covering the scientific literature, we sometimes write about cases in other media that shed light on how different outlets correct the record. This is one of those times.

The New York Times issued an editor’s note and correction last week to a June 26 article about Happy the elephant, who some argue is suffering because she lives isolated from the other elephants at the Bronx Zoo.

After publication, however, the paper made a major discovery about the writer of the piece, Tracy Tullis: She had signed an online petition to move Happy to an elephant sanctuary. As they write in the editor’s note: Continue reading New York Times says it “would not have assigned” elephant article to writer had they known of conflict

Journal quarantines MERS paper, posts EoC for “rights to use the data”

Eurosurveillance is investigating potential problems with study on the deadly breakout of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in South Korea. The notice was issued after the journal discovered that study data might have been used without permission.

“Epidemiological investigation of MERS-CoV spread in a single hospital in South Korea, May to June 2015,” was published last month by a group of researchers at the Gyeonggi Infectious Disease Control Center in Korea, and details 37 cases of people at one hospital, one portion of the nearly 200 who’ve developed the new respiratory infection since the outbreak began. The researchers tracked the path of infection from one initial patient to 25 secondary cases, who then infected 11 additional people. As the researchers note:

Continue reading Journal quarantines MERS paper, posts EoC for “rights to use the data”

30+ papers flagged because editors may have “subverted the peer review process” with fake accounts

In what has become a familiar story, another publisher has found more than 30 papers that appear to have been accepted and published based on fake peer reviews.

Hindawi, publisher of more than 400 journals, is having 32 papers re-reviewed after an investigation

…identified three Editors who appear to have subverted the peer review process by creating fraudulent reviewer accounts and using these accounts to submit favorable review reports.

The publisher launched its investigation following BioMed Central’s November announcement that they had found at least 50 papers accepted because of fake reviews. That announcement came days after we published a feature in Nature on the phenomenon. BMC eventually retracted 43 articles.

As Hindawi notes in a statement posted to its site today: Continue reading 30+ papers flagged because editors may have “subverted the peer review process” with fake accounts

Recursive recursiveness: Retracted Lewandowsky et al conspiracy ideation study republished

A paper on “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” whose puzzling publication (and retraction) history formed the basis of a series of Retraction Watch posts in 2013 and 2014 is back, as part of a new article in a different journal.

Retraction Watch readers may recall a paper published in 2013 in Frontiers in Psychology. That paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” was an attempt by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues to describe the reactions to another controversial Psychological Science paper Lewandowsky had co-authored, “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.”

The reason we started writing about the Frontiers paper was that it was removed from the journal’s site in March of 2013, for unclear reasons, before being formally retracted a year later with a reference to an investigation that “did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study” but found that “the legal context is insufficiently clear.” Continue reading Recursive recursiveness: Retracted Lewandowsky et al conspiracy ideation study republished

JAMA issues mega-correction for data breach letter due to “wording and data errors”

A JAMA letter published in April on data breaches accidentally included some data that shouldn’t have been published, either — specifically, “wording and data errors” that affected five sentences and more than 10 entries in a table. One result — a reported increase in breaches over time — also went from statistically significant to “borderline” significant, according to the first author. (So yeah, this post earns our “mega correction” category.)

According to an author, an “older version” of a table made it into the letter, “Data Breaches of Protected Health Information in the United States,” which was corrected in the journal’s June 23/30 issue.

The letter and table in question detail 949 breaches of “unencrypted protected health information.” The letter says the number of breaches has increased from 2010 to 2013; the original article claimed that the P value on that increase was <.001, but the correction says it’s really 0.07. The original says 29.1 million personal records were affected in those breaches; the real number is 29.0. And so on.

Continue reading JAMA issues mega-correction for data breach letter due to “wording and data errors”

To catch a cheat: Paper improves on stats method that nailed prolific retractor Fujii

The author of a 2012 paper in Anaesthesia which offered the statistical equivalent of coffin nails to the case against record-breaking fraudster Yoshitaka Fujii (currently at the top of our leaderboard) has written a new article in which he claims to have improved upon his approach.

As we’ve written previously, John Carlisle, an anesthesiologist in the United Kingdom, analyzed nearly 170 papers by Fujii and found aspects of the reported data to be astronomically improbable. It turns out, however, that he made a mistake that, while not fatal to his initial conclusions, required fixing in a follow-up paper, titled “Calculating the probability of random sampling for continuous variables in submitted or published randomised controlled trials,” also published in Anaesthesia.

According to the abstract:

Continue reading To catch a cheat: Paper improves on stats method that nailed prolific retractor Fujii

“The Replication Paradox:” Sans other fixes, replication may cause more harm than good, says new paper

M.A.L.M van Assen — Marcel .A.L.M van Assen

In a paper that might be filed under “careful what you wish for,” a group of psychology researchers is warning that the push to replicate more research — the focus of a lot of attention recently — won’t do enough to improve the scientific literature. And in fact, it could actually worsen some problems — namely, the bias towards positive findings.

Here’s more from “The replication paradox: Combining studies can decrease accuracy of effect size estimates,” by Michèle B. Nuijten, Marcel A. L. M. van Assen, Coosje L. S. Veldkamp, and Jelte M. Wicherts, all of Tilburg University: Continue reading “The Replication Paradox:” Sans other fixes, replication may cause more harm than good, says new paper

Cancer Research retraction is fifth for Robert Weinberg; fourth for his former student

Another domino has fallen in a chain of retractions for Robert Weinberg, the man who discovered the first tumor-causing gene in humans, along with the first tumor suppressor gene: Cancer Research just retracted a paper of his on some of the molecular steps to metastasis.

The paper, “Concurrent Suppression of Integrin α₅, Radixin, and RhoA Phenocopies the Effects of miR-31 on Metastasis,” has been cited 70 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As we have noted before, Weinberg’s papers are frequently highly cited. His bio at the Whitehead Institute bills him as “a pioneer in cancer research.”

Four of Weinberg’s retracted papers — including this latest — share a first author: Scott Valastyan, once a very promising grad student in Weinberg’s lab.

This retraction, like Valastyan’s others, is linked to his retracted 2009 Cell paper. (That paper was cited 482 times, and there’s even a video from the Cell press office to go with it). Continue reading Cancer Research retraction is fifth for Robert Weinberg; fourth for his former student

Another author withdrawal from JBC earns another opaque notice

The authors of a 2014 study on the biochemical changes that can encourage the progression of cancer have withdrawn the paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The post from the JBC – which we’ve noted are rarely helpful – doesn’t provide any details or reason for the withdrawal. As usual, this is all we got:

Continue reading Another author withdrawal from JBC earns another opaque notice