This week we read a piece from a frustrated researcher and teacher. One of the regulars at thenewstatictics.com recounted stories from others on finding serious mistakes in published research and trying to get authors to make corrections.
“The joke of self-correcting science: The Andero lab and Nature Communications” – thenewstatistics.com, January. 2021
The results are usually not encouraging. The author then detailed a personal experience trying to contact an author and then the editor of a paper that made it all the way up to publication in a title from Nature [that’s kind of a big deal].
Data was downloaded and checked. Analyses were done. Conclusions opposite to the published paper were found supported. The paper author was emailed and messaged a half dozen times. The editor was contacted (from which a curt reply was gotten weeks later). After months of trying, what did our author get for his trouble?
…the only action the Andero lab seems to have taken is to block me on Twitter
The world of research publishing, especially when involving a large old-school publishing house, is notoriously slow. But nothing will ever happen if the people involved aren’t motivated in the first place to do consistently and currently honest, earnest, and diligent work.
As Bob here says, after detailing his own experience with an embarrassing correction,
If you don’t want to be in agony over the correctness of your papers, please and for real: find something else to do.