This week in Nature, Daniele Fanelli at Stanford made an interesting proposal: Set up a system of “self-retraction” that makes it crystal clear when a paper is pulled for honest error, rather than misconduct. Fanelli, a whose work we have frequently covered, rightly notes that honest error represents a minority of retractions — around 20%. … Continue reading Poll: Should there be a way to “self-retract” for honest error?
After a group of researchers noticed an error that affected the analysis of a survey of psychologists working with medical teams to help pediatric patients, they didn’t just issue a retraction — they published a commentary explaining what exactly went wrong. The error was discovered by a research assistant who was assembling a scientific poster, and noticed … Continue reading What to do when you make a mistake? Advice from authors who’ve been there
In Latin America, retractions for plagiarism and other issues have increased markedly — which may be a positive sign that editors and authors are paying closer attention to publishing ethics, according to a small study published in Science and Engineering Ethics. The authors examined two major Latin American/Caribbean databases, which mostly include journals from Brazil, and have been indexing … Continue reading Is an increase in retractions good news? Maybe, suggests new study
Readers of this blog know that we have had a few stock villains over the years. High on the list has been the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), and we’ve criticized repeatedly the journal’s unwillingness to provide any information about the reasons for retractions. For as long as we’ve been around, the JBC’s stock retraction statement seemed to … Continue reading Now this is good news: In policy change, JBC will now make retraction notices informative
Cunning science fraudsters may not give many tells in their data, but the text of their papers may be a tipoff to bad behavior. That’s according to a new paper in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology by a pair of linguists at Stanford University who say that the writing style of data cheats … Continue reading Can linguistic patterns identify data cheats?
A group of authors have withdrawn a 2011 Journal of Biological Chemistry paper, but then appear to have re-published almost the same paper a month later, only this time with just five of the original nine authors. The paper, “HDAC3-dependent reversible lysine acetylation of cardiac myosin heavy chain isoforms modulates their enzymatic and motor activity,” … Continue reading Déjà vu: JBC epigenetics paper is retracted, then largely re-published with fewer authors
How should scientists think about papers that have undergone what appears to be a cursory peer review? Perhaps the papers were reviewed in a day — or less — or simply green-lighted by an editor, without an outside look. That’s a question Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford University autism researcher, asked herself when she noticed some … Continue reading Poll: What to do when peer review feels inadequate?
The Journal of Neuroscience has yanked an Alzheimer’s paper and banned three University of Pennsylvania authors from publishing there temporarily, following conflicting investigations by the university and the publisher, the Society for Neuroscience, into the data. The 2011 paper looked into the cellular makeup of the characteristic plaques that develop in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. … Continue reading SfN journal retracts paper, bans UPenn researchers over “data misrepresentation”
Dear Retraction Watch readers, we have some exciting news to share. After more than four years, 2,000 posts, and incredible responses from the scientific community, we are thrilled to announce that The Center For Scientific Integrity, a not-for-profit corporation we’ve established, has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to expand the work … Continue reading Retraction Watch is growing, thanks to a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation
Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that legal issues seem to be popping up more often in the cases we cover. There has been a lawsuit filed against PubPeer commenters, for example, and Nature last month blamed lawyers for delayed and opaque retraction notices. It was those cases and others that prompted us to … Continue reading Are lawyers ruining science?