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 the dust settles. Those high numbers caught the attention of a lot of major media outlets, from Nature to NPR to the Wall Street Journal. Science publications, including LiveScience and The Scientist, have done their own end-of-year retraction lists.

It was also a good year for us at Retraction Watch. Many news outlets featured us in their coverage, either picking up stories we’d broken or asking us for comment on big-picture issues. Three national NPR programs — Science Friday, On the Media, and All Things Considered — had us on air. We launched a column in LabTimes, and Nature asked us to write a year-end commentary. We even earned a Wikipedia entry.

All of that has contributed to the fact that sometime today, we’ll surpass 1.5 million pageviews. We’ve tapped into a passionate and helpful community of readers, without whom much of Retraction Watch wouldn’t be possible. You send us great tips, add valuable commentary, keep us honest by correcting our errors, and encourage us at ever step.

So: Thank you.

Now, which journals had the most retractions?

By our unofficial count, the winner would appear to be the Journal of Biological Chemistry, with 15. Those tended to come in groups, with four from Silvia Bulfone-Paus’s lab, four from the late Maria Diverse-Pierlussi’s group, three from Jesse Roman’s lab, and two from Zhiguo Wang’s. One of the other two was from Harvard cancer researcher — and New Yorker staff writer — Jerome Groopman’s lab. There are four more on the way from Ashok Kumar’s University of Ottawa lab, although it looks as though those will actually appear in 2012.

We covered seven in Blood, eight in the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences, and eight in the Journal of Immunology.

Science had five, including two very high-profile ones, longevity genes and chronic fatigue syndrome-XMRV, compared to just two last year.

Last year, Nature did some soul-searching when they got to November and had published four retractions. This year, they published just one.

Rounding out the “glamour journals,” Cell had just one, compared to four last year.

Personal best?

Of course, the person with the most retractions was Joachim Boldt, with 89. Naoki Mori was a distant second, with 32, although a few of those ran last year. Claudio Airoldi’s group retracted 11. And most of the journals listed above were touched by other big names in Retractionville, including Bulfone-Paus, who has now retracted 13, and Anil Potti, who has now retracted 7.

Jatinder Ahluwalia was only forced to retract one paper this year, after retracting one last year. But the revelations that followed cost him a job at the University of East London, and may cause Imperial to strip him of his PhD. His case is a good reminder of why it’s a good idea to poke at what lies beneath retractions.

Here were our top five posts by traffic:

1. The retraction of an editorial about why semen is a good Valentine’s Day gift, by eminent surgeon Lazar Greenfield
2. The retraction of a bizarre paper claiming that science and spirituality both came from space
3. Our coverage of the Claudio Airoldi case
4. Our now-infamous “none of your damn business” post, covered by Ben Goldacre
5. Our scoop on two retractions by Zhiguo Wang, who later resigned from the Montreal Heart Institute

Looking forward to 2012

Our wish list is much the same as it was for 2011, particularly better explanations of why particular papers are being retracted, and better publicity for retractions. We’ll add one item to that list: Journals, please stop letting researchers make claims in retraction notices and corrections, unless you peer-review them. Why should we trust the word of researchers who’ve demonstrated they make errors, intentional or not?

And we’ll be keeping an eye on what may be an emerging trend: The mega-correction. We’ve seen errata notices that correct so many different errors, it’s hard to believe the paper shouldn’t have been retracted. It’s unclear what this means yet, but watch this space for coverage of more examples.

We also may be coming to your town. See our list of upcoming appearances, which will be regularly updated. Get in touch if you’d like to host us; we love engaging with readers in person. And don’t forget the Retraction Watch Store.

Happy New Year.

10 Academic Frauds Who Had Everyone Fooled

Admit it. We’ve all had that moment, deep into a school research project, where the realization hits that the neat hypothesis we had when we started working is not going to be borne out by the data. At that point, we are faced with two options: a) start over, instantly making all those hours already spent a complete waste of time; or, b) fudge the data and transform that stinker into a sexy little piece of academia. For a student, the consequences of such fakery could be as severe as expulsion from school. But for professional academics, the stakes are much higher. Millions of dollars and professional and personal reputations hang in the balance.

Here are ten of the worst frauds, fakers, and phonies ever to pull the wool over the bespectacled eyes of the academic world: >>>

Fraud in the ivory tower (and a big one too)

Freek Vermeulen

The fraud of Diederik Stapel – professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands – was enormous. His list of publications was truly impressive, both in terms of the content of the articles as well as its sheer number and the prestige of the journals in which it was published: dozens of articles in all the top psychology journals in academia with a number of them in famous general science outlets such as Science. His seemingly careful research was very thorough in terms of its research design, and was thought to reveal many intriguing insights about fundamental human nature. The problem was, he had made it all up…

For years – so we know now – Diederik Stapel made up all his data. He would carefully reiterature, design all the studies (with his various co-authors), set up the experiments, print out all the questionnaires, and then, instead of actually doing the experiments and distributing the questionnaires, made it all up. Just like that.

He finally got caught because, eventually, he did not even bother anymore to really make up newly faked data. He used the same (fake) numbers for different experiments, gave those to his various PhD students to analyze, who then in disbelief slaving away in their adjacent cubicles discovered that their very different experiments led to exactly the same statistical values (a near impossibility). When they compared their databases, there was substantial overlap. There was no denying it any longer; Diederik Stapel, was making it up; he was immediately fired by the university, admitted to his lengthy fraud, and handed back his PhD degree.

In an open letter, sent to Dutch newspapers to try to explain his actions, he cited the huge pressures to come up with interesting findings that he had been under, in the publish or perish culture that exist in the academic world, which he had been unable to resist, and which led him to his extreme actions.

There are various things I find truly remarkable and puzzling about the case of Diederik Stapel.

• The first one is the sheer scale and (eventually) outright clumsiness of his fraud. It also makes me realize that there must be dozens, maybe hundreds of others just like him. They just do it a little bit less, less extreme, and are probably a bit more sophisticated about it, but they’re subject to the exact same pressures and temptations as Diederik Stapel. Surely others give in to them as well. He got caught because he was flying so high, he did it so much, and so clumsily. But I am guessing that for every fraud that gets caught, due to hubris, there are at least ten other ones that don’t.
• The second one is that he did it at all. Of course because it is fraud, unethical, and unacceptable, but also because it sort of seems he did not really need it. You have to realize that “getting the data” is just a very small proportion of all the skills and capabilities one needs to get published. You have to really know and understand the literature; you have to be able to carefully design an experiment, ruling out any potential statistical biases, alternative explanations, and other pitfalls; you have to be able to write it up so that it catches people’s interest and imagination; and you have to be able to see the article through the various reviewers and steps in the publication process that every prestigious academic journal operates. Those are substantial and difficult skills; all of which Diederik Stapel possessed. All he did is make up the data; something which is just a small proportion of the total set of skills required, and something that he could have easily outsourced to one of his many PhD students. Sure, you then would not have had the guarantee that the experiment would come out the way you wanted them, but who knows, they could.
• That’s what I find puzzling as well; that at no point he seems to have become curious whether his experiments might actually work without him making it all up. They were interesting experiments; wouldn’t you at some point be tempted to see whether they might work…?
• Truly amazing I also find the fact that he never stopped. It seems he has much in common with Bernard Madoff and his Ponzi Scheme, or the notorious traders in investments banks such as 827 million Nick Leeson, who brought down Barings Bank with his massive fraudulent trades, Societe Generale’s 4.9 billion Jerome Kerviel, and UBS’s 2.3 billion Kweku Adoboli. The difference: Stapel could have stopped. For people like Madoff or the rogue traders, there was no way back; once they had started the fraud there was no stopping it. But Stapel could have stopped at any point. Surely at some point he must have at least considered this? I guess he was addicted; addicted to the status and aura of continued success.
• Finally, what I find truly amazing is that he was teaching the Ethics course at Tilburg University. You just don’t make that one up; that’s Dutch irony at its best.