“[A]ll of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise”: Correction of paper on Democrats’ economic policy

Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University and a friend of the blog, has corrected a 2008 paper in the blunt way you’d expect him to. Here’s the notice in the Annals of Applied Statistics: In the paper, “Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy?” AOAS 2 (2), 536-549 (2008), by Andrew … Continue reading “[A]ll of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise”: Correction of paper on Democrats’ economic policy

“What I find offensive is not that they plagiarized us, it’s that they did it so badly”

Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the work of Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist who has taken a tough stance about many of the problems in his field and coordinates the Reproducibility Project. So it must have seemed quite ironic for Nosek and his co-authors to learn today that one of their … Continue reading “What I find offensive is not that they plagiarized us, it’s that they did it so badly”

Study finds many authors aren’t sharing data when they publish — and leads to a PLOS ONE retraction

A new study in Clinical Chemistry paints an alarming picture of how often scientists deposit data that they’re supposed to — but perhaps not surprisingly, papers whose authors did submit such data scored higher on a quality scale than those whose authors didn’t deposit their data. Ken Witwer, a pathobiologist at Hopkins, was concerned that … Continue reading Study finds many authors aren’t sharing data when they publish — and leads to a PLOS ONE retraction

First retraction for Eric Smart, who faked dozens of images, appears in PNAS

Eric Smart, who as we reported in November was sanctioned by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) for faking dozens of images in ten papers and seven grants over the past decade, has had his first retraction. Here’s the December 24 notice, from PNAS:

Protein structure retracted after investigation into “highly improbable features,” journal calls it fraud

In 2010, a group of crystallographers immunologists and allergy researchers at the University of Salzburg published a paper in the Journal of Immunology claiming to have derived the structure of a birch pollen allergen. That structure, however, caught the attention of Bernhard Rupp, an eminent crystallographer. In January of this year, Rupp submitted a paper … Continue reading Protein structure retracted after investigation into “highly improbable features,” journal calls it fraud

The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011

If Retraction Watch was actually a business, as opposed — for the moment, anyway — to a labor of love for two guys with day jobs, 2011 would have been a very good year for business. It was a year that will probably see close to 400 retractions, including a number of high-profile ones, once … Continue reading The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011

Two detailed retraction notices appear in PNAS

We’ve fallen a bit behind in our coverage of retractions in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), so we wanted to call attention to two very helpful ones from recent months. Here’s one notice, which appeared online on August 5:

Why did Science partially retract the XMRV-chronic fatigue syndrome paper?

If past experience is any indication, billions of pixels will be spilled in the coming days as scientists and advocates debate the latest twist in the story of XMRV, or xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Today’s news is that Science is partially retracting a 2009 paper by Judy Mikovits and colleagues, including … Continue reading Why did Science partially retract the XMRV-chronic fatigue syndrome paper?

Imperial, where Jatinder Ahluwalia earned his PhD, has re-run experiments, and is now reviewing results

If you’ve been wondering what’s happening in the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia, the University of East London researcher who has been found guilty of faking data as a graduate student at Cambridge and of misconduct at University College London, so have we. We last reported, in February, that Imperial College London, where Ahluwalia earned his … Continue reading Imperial, where Jatinder Ahluwalia earned his PhD, has re-run experiments, and is now reviewing results

Roundup: A new record? And paper retracts story about Canadian Paxil researcher-turned pol Kutcher

We’ve both been at conferences — Adam at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists in Savannah, and Ivan at the Council of Science Editors in Baltimore, where he’ll be on a panel today about finding fraud — so we haven’t had a lot of time to run down retractions. But there were a few retraction-related developments … Continue reading Roundup: A new record? And paper retracts story about Canadian Paxil researcher-turned pol Kutcher