By now, Retraction Watch readers are familiar with papers that are withdrawn because of faked data. Those cases may involve pressure cooker environments, bad seeds, or both, but they’re usually intentional. But what if a researcher fabricated findings without even knowing it?
That’s the idea behind a provocative paper just published online in Science and Engineering Ethics. In it, Matan Shelomi, a graduate student in entomology at the University of California, Davis, describes the case of Jay Traver, an entomologist who, in 1951, published a description of her experiences with “a mite infestation of her scalp that resisted all treatment and was undetectable to anyone other than herself” in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington (PESW). As Shelomi notes: Continue reading Retraction by reason of insanity? A look at a 60-year-old entomology paper
