In the last week, a lot more people know the name of Brendan O’Connor. Recently, the graduate student at the University of Leicester in the UK posted allegations on Twitter that a prominent psychologist at Cornell University, Robert Sternberg, had recycled large swaths of text in multiple publications. Since then, other so-called “data thugs” — … Continue reading A new “data thug” is born
Both editors of a math journal have resigned over the decision to publish a controversial paper, which was apparently made without consulting the editorial board. Last week, the editorial board of EMS Surveys in Mathematical Sciences issued a statement about the paper, saying its acceptance was “a serious mistake.” According to the statement, the two … Continue reading Editors-in-chief of math journal resign over controversial paper
A math journal has retracted a 2015 paper after three outside experts informed the editors that “the paper contains errors which invalidate its main results.” According to the retraction notice, published in the July 2017 issue of Manuscripta Mathematica, the author Ilya Karzhemanov “has not admitted to the alleged errors and disagrees with the retraction.” … Continue reading Mathematician protests retraction, alleging “manhunt”
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has noticed something: More of the research it’s funding is ending up in questionable journals. Recently, the agency issued a statement highlighting some qualities of these journals — aggressively soliciting submissions, failing to provide clear information about pricing — and urging researchers to avoid them. The NIH’s goal: to … Continue reading NIH to researchers: Don’t publish in bad journals, please
One of the world’s most prestigious mathematics journals has issued what appears to be its first retraction. The Annals of Mathematics recently withdrew a 2001 paper exploring the properties of certain symmetrical spaces. What prompted this retraction? And why did it occur 16 years after the paper was published?
Statisticians are mounting a challenge to a much-publicized study suggesting that human lifespan has a limit of approximately 115 years — 125, tops. Published last October in Nature, the study from scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York was the eleventh most talked-about piece of research in 2016, according to Altmetric. The … Continue reading Widely publicized Nature study on human age limit draws fire
A mathematics journal has withdrawn a paper after discovering that the results were not new. The paper, published online in March in Communications in Algebra, explored the properties of group rings, a discipline of algebra. According to editor-in-chief of the journal, Jason Bell, author Francis E. A. Johnson, a professor of mathematics at the University … Continue reading No new math: Journal pulls math paper with “already known” results
A Rutgers computer scientist is retracting conference proceedings via an unusual channel: his personal blog. On April 7, Anand Sarwate wrote that he was retracting a mathematical proof from the proceedings from the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), after discovering errors that invalidated the result. He explains in the blog … Continue reading Rutgers prof announces retraction on his blog
The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at a school where everyone has published in possibly predatory journals, and doubts about a study of doing math unconsciously. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
In 2012, news media were abuzz with a new finding from PNAS: Authors based in Israel had found evidence that our brains can unconsciously process more than we thought — including basic math and reading. In other words, the authors claimed people could read and do math without even knowing what they were doing. With … Continue reading Can we do math unconsciously? Replicators of a prominent 2012 study have some doubts