Nature retracts paper that claimed adult stem cell could become any type of cell

And sometimes you fail to reproduce something because you failed to do it properly. I don't know how often that happens in the field on in the lab, but it's extremely common on the computational side.

Very often, the thing you are trying to reproduce isn't exactly the same that was published. You have to adapt the instructions to your specific case, which can easily go wrong. Or maybe you did a mistake in following the instructions. Or maybe you mixed the instructions for two different cases, because you didn't fully understand the subtleties of the topic. Or maybe you made a mistake in translating the provided scripts to your institute's computational environment.

You're going to have to provide evidence, as in actual bona-fide promotions handed out, or Tenure committees expressly spelling out and counting this as a factor in their decision

Income tax departments in my country give a small reward (3-5% of the amount in question) if you report tax fraud.

Maybe we could have something like that, where the vigilance department receives a small amount of money paid off from the penalty imposed on the researcher with bad/fraudulent research.

That's not an accurate comparison, in my experience. Police operate as a thin blue line. Academics operate as jackals and hyenas in the Serengeti, and many would eviserate literally anyone if they could get another grant. Best admired from afar.

There isn't enough incentive currently to publish reproductions, starting a new journal using the same general publishing model isn't going to change that. But with money to burn you could add some incentive, or you could at least do things to improve publication quality like actually paying for good peer reviewers.

As I said in another comment, I think it'd be much easier to convince Nature to create a new article type, Replication Study.

Nature, as well as other top journals, do not publish results that report already published findings. Replication Studies would be the exception. These would provide independent validation of a recent prominent article.

People would think twice before misrepresenting findings in top journals, and good ideas would spread out more quickly.

It’s bad enough that too often I trust companies over academics nowadays. At the end of the day, a company has to answer to the customer. If what they offer doesn’t actually work, they go out of business. Academics often don’t have to answer to anyone. Just be smart and make the paper look good while being careful not to do something that could get you nailed for outright fraud.

This is the key part, even legitimate findings tend to be exaggerated. A great step forward would be to distribute grants to reproduce new key findings.

For example, the NIH could identify the top findings from 2024 that need to be reproduced, and seek expressions of interest to reproduce these and/or other important findings identified by applicants. Perhaps, also reach an agreement with top journals to publish replications as a new article type, and link them to the original one, just like they do with comments/news & views.

It would instantly make those publishing super edgy findings much more careful, just in case, and things would become more efficient.

>The cost to reproduce a study will be significantly higher than to produce it in the first place

wdym? You're on the happy path when reproducing, the cost of the original study includes all the failed attempts.

I don't know about your friend, but there was an option piece, not a scientific study, that reported about that number of "landmark" cancer research papers as being "not-reproducible" in industry hands.

However, it did not have methods, it didn't say how they were not reproducible, as in a figure or an effect etc.

The closest thing to a definition of "reproducible" was a footnote on a table defining it as "sufficient to drive a drug development program," which is not at all the same thing as reproducible.

Which is to say, I'm skeptical of these anecdotes.

The incentive to the PI (professor).

"I replicated X's work" or even "I was unable to replicate X's work" isn't exactly a career maker

Although I guess you could get the few staff scientists at the NIH to handle it.

Some older professors who already have tenure might be willing to help out, if they don't already have much else on their plate

My sense is that this would prevent 98% of papers in the social sciences from ever being published. How do you decide whether to renew a researcher's position when the average time to get a single paper through peer review is 5+ years (my average is 2-3 contract renewals per year)? This is not compatible with today's pace.

I am not saying that all this is a desirable situation. It is very unfortunate, and I wish there was an easy solution. My first research paper took 5 major revisions and 6 years to get through peer review. All the reviewers criticized was the wording and my unwillingness to conform to the accepted views in that particular community; I almost lost my job over this, but once the paper was accepted, it won several awards. All of this leads me to believe that peer review is very subjective and prone to error, and I don't have a solution for that.

Like very valid research being lost because they mention a retracted paper for some minor point that doesn’t really have a major impact on the final results.

> If the citation doesn't materially affect the paper, the author can re-publish it with that removed.

This paper is 22 years old. Some authors have retired. Some are dead.

I really think that at the very least it needs a quick sniff test. Which is boring uninteresting work and with 4,500 citations that will take some effort, but that's why we pay the journals big bucks. Otherwise it's just going to be the academic variant of the Scunthorpe problem.

And/or do something more fine-grained than a binary retraction, such as adding in a clear warning that a citation was retracted and telling readers to double-check that citation specifically.

If you are cherry-picking cites that agree with you, that is a much bigger scandal than you citing a paper that ended up being retracted 22 years later. The point of citations is to cite the relevant literature, pro and con.

I guess you can have something like a nofollow attribute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

although the incentives will be more confusing.

There's an argument to be made that citing something to disagree with it should increase its prestige but not its credibility (to the extent that those can be separated): you're agreeing that it's important.

> but your work depends on that wrong work, so your work is probably wrong

No, absolutely not, that's pure fallacy.

There might be some small subset of citations that work like a mathematical proof, but how many of these 4500 citations could you find that operate that way?

Academic papers have to cite related research to situate their contribution, even if they're not directly building on that research. When researchers can't reproduce a paper's results, they have to cite that paper when reporting that, or no one will know what they're talking about and the bad paper cannot be refuted. The whole system also needs many compare and contrast citations that aren't built on directly or at all, so you know what a paper is doing and not doing.

I can't think of a single paper that would fall apart to any of its cited papers being retracted. What field of science operates that way?

Science papers are novel contributions of data, and sometimes of purely computational methods. A data paper will stand on its own. A method paper will usually (or at least should) operate across multiple data sets to compare performance, or if only on a single dataset it's gonna to be a very well tested dataset.

If MNist turns out to be retracted, would we have to remove all the papers that used it over their years? That's about as deep as a citation can get into being fundamental and integral to a paper. And even in that case nearly any paper operating in that dataset will also be using other datasets. Sure, ignore a paper that only evaluates on a single retracted dataset, but why even bother retracting, as the paper would be ignored anyway, because what significant paper would use a single benchmark?

But 99.9% of citations have less bearing on a paper than being a fundamental dataset used to evaluate the claims in the paper. And those citations are inherently well-tested work product already.

So if people actually care about science, they would never even propose such a scheme. They would bother to at least understand what a citation was first.

I don't know which way would be better, since I don't know the subtleties of citations in different fields. I'll just note that automatically applying this modest taint to papers that cite retracted papers is some incentive for the person to be discerning in what they cite.

Of course, some papers pretty much have to be cited, because they're obviously very relevant, and you just have to risk an annoying red mark appearing in your paper if that mandatory citation is ever retracted.

But citations that are more discretionary or political, in some subfields (e.g., you know someone from that PI's lab is going to be a reviewer), if you think their pettiness might be matched by the sloppiness/sketchiness of their work, then maybe you don't give them that citation, after all.

If this means everyone in a field has incentive for citations to become lower-risk for this embarrassing taint, then maybe that field starts taking misconduct and reviewing more seriously.

Thus incentivizing authors to add citations to established papers for no reason other than to increase their own trust score. Which already happens to a degree but this would magnify that tenfold.

I think usually there's too much building off of each other for this. Standing on the shoulders of giants and whatnot. To me that's the purpose of society and human evolution but I won't get preachy. I didn't read the stem cell paper, but I'll use it for example. Let's say the stem cell paper says "stem cells are one type of cell from the human body" which cites some paper that first found stem cells. Maybe that paper cited the paper that first found any cells. And that one cited a paper about the molecular makeup of some part of the cell. And that cited a paper about what it means for an atom to be in a molecule. And that cited some paper about how atoms can contain electrons, and then that electrons are particles and waves.

I think, personally, it's unrealistic to expect every researcher who mentions anything that has an electron in it (aka most things) to need to recreate the double slit experiment. Or, to harvest the stem cells themselves instead of buying them from trusted suppliers. Yes I do as I type this out see more that if more re-experimenting was done it would help detect fraud. But crucially, it really doesn't matter what an electron is to people determining that stems cells are in humans. The "non-negotiably" is what worries me. There should be some negotiation to say "hey your paper uses this debunked article. You have x days to find another, proven paper that supports the argument, or remove the argument entirely, or we'll retract your paper as well." I think that's valid. Especially since the fraud here wouldn't be impacting the author using the bad paper (most of the time, I would imagine) but rather the ones writing the paper. I would hesitate to believe that people faking such crucial, potentially lifesaving research care that some nobody they'll never meet might be upset their paper doesn't make it.

I think really what I'd like to see instead is more checking done at the peer review stage. To me that's the whole point of the journal. I'm biased on this having been rejected during the peer review stage and disliking how expensive journal articles can get, but at the end of the day, that's the point of them. They should be doing everything in their power to ensure that the research is accurate. And if we can't trust that, what's the point to the journals at all? May as well just go on blogs or something.

In practice, wrong findings that aren't due to misconduct and aren't very recent are usually not retracted though. It's just considered part of the history of science that some old papers have proofs or results now known to be false. It is pretty common in mathematics, for example, for people to discover (and publish) errors they found in old proofs, without the journal going back and retracting the old proof. A famous example is Hilbert's (incorrect) sketch of a proof for the continuum hypothesis [1].

[1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/272028/hilberts-alleged-p...

> I corrected the experimental methodology and while the results weren't quite as good, they were still quite good and I got published with the correct results.

I disagree. Your new results were much better, because they were sound.

Very well done.

Minor detail- I believe this would be called "withdrawing" a paper rather than retraction as it had not been published yet.

Name and shame

It’s why certain ethnicities cannot pronounce words in their non-native language. Like people from the US not being able to make certain consonant sounds in German or Chinese being unable to pronounce the R consonant. So go look it up yourself.

By your logic, every cell in the human body is a brain cell.