“Boom, headshot!” Disputed video game paper retracted

After a years-long dispute over a 2012 paper which suggested there might be some effects of first-person shooter video games on players, the journal has retracted the paper. The stated reason in the notice: Some outside researchers spotted irregularities in the data, and contacted the corresponding author’s institution, Ohio State University, in 2015. Since the original […]

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BMJ won’t retract controversial dietary guidelines article; issues lengthy correction

The BMJ has released a detailed correction to a much-debated article critiquing the expert report underlying the U.S. dietary guidelines. After the article was published in 2015, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) organized a letter signed by more than 100 researchers, urging the publication to retract the article. Today, the journal said it found “no […]

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More questions arise over gene-editing tool

A new letter signed by 20 researchers is casting additional doubts on the validity of a potentially invaluable lab tool — and alleges the lab that produced the initial results turned them away when they tried to replicate its findings in mammalian cells. In a letter published this week in Protein & Cell, the researchers […]

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Is China using organs from executed prisoners? Researchers debate issue in the literature

A researcher is calling for the retraction of a paper about a recent ban in the use of organs from executed prisoners in China, accusing the authors of misrepresenting the state of the practice. In April 2015, a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics welcomed the ban by the Chinese government as “a step in the right […]

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Upon request, NEJM added note to help Texas distance itself from Planned Parenthood article

The New England Journal of Medicine added a disclaimer to a recent article about the effects of funding cuts to Planned Parenthood, after a request from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, saying it wanted to distance itself from the paper. Since the paper was published in February, one author has stepped down from his position at […]

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NEJM: No plan to clarify wording that led to allegations of breached confidentiality

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has no plans to change the wording of an article that led to allegations of breached patient confidentiality and caused a minor social media firestorm this past weekend, the journal told Retraction Watch. The paragraph in question appeared in an essay by Lisa Rosenbaum chronicling the history of power […]

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PLOS ONE retracting paper that cites “the Creator”

PLOS ONE has retracted a paper published one month ago after readers began criticizing it for mentioning “the Creator.” The article “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living” now includes a reader comment from PLOS Staff, noting: The PLOS ONE editors have followed up on the concerns raised about this publication. […]

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Why publishing negative findings is hard

When a researcher encountered two papers that suggested moonlight has biological effects — on both plants and humans — he took a second look at the data, and came to different conclusions. That was the easy part — getting the word out about his negative findings, however, was much more difficult. When Jean-Luc Margot, a […]

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Cancer Cell paper under investigation following anonymous queries on PubPeer

A Cancer Cell paper that caused a flurry of activity on the website PubPeer is under investigation, after the last author announced on the site that he’d requested a correction from the journal. The 2012 paper sparked a lively dialogue last month on the post-publication discussion site, as commenters questioned Western blot images in which […]

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Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device

To climate scientist Pieter Tans, a “novel” air sampling device in a recent paper looked a little too familiar. Specifically, like a device that he had invented — the AirCore, which he calls a “tape recorder” for air. The journal editors came up with a unique solution to the disagreement that followed, which the editor in chief called […]

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