A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.
This Australian retraction highlights problems with the currents approach to retractions – visibility and lack of detail.
James Steele, an exercise researcher at the ukactive Research Institute in England — part of a group of data sleuths who have been responsible for identifying unlikely data in several other studies in his field — told us that he became of aware of the retractions inadvertently:
We first noticed the retraction because we are in the midst of a systematic review and meta-analysis which included one of the studies. We were on a second round of independent search and screening to check we were turning up the same papers when this time round we noticed it had been retracted. However, the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research didn’t provide any information as to why.
