An illuminating profile of Diederik Stapel in the New York Times Magazine

The New York Times Magazine has a great profile — featuring an in-depth interview — of Diederik Stapel this weekend. Check it out. (Or, if you’re visiting us because the magazine was kind enough to include a link to Retraction Watch, welcome! And find all of our Stapel coverage here.)

One of a number of highlights in the piece by Yudhijit Battacharjee:

Brian Deer’s modest proposal for post-publication peer review

Brian Deer’s name will no doubt be familiar to many Retraction Watch readers. Deer, of course, is the award-winning investigative reporter known for his reporting on numerous medical issues, including Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted research into autism and vaccines.

Deer is giving a talk next week at the UK’s “Evidence Live” conference,and has a proposal that he hopes will make it more difficult for dishonest researchers to hide their misdeeds — and make it easier for journals to retract fraudulent papers. He has expressed concern before that voluntary codes have no teeth. Deer is proposing an amendment to the ICMJE’s Uniform Requirements for the Submission of Manuscripts to Biomedical Journals:

Is a retraction in the works for America’s Got Talent star?

We try to avoid straying beyond science on this blog, but sometimes — as in the case of This American Life, which not long ago had to retract a segment featuring Mike Daisey that had been critical of the conditions in a Chinese factory linked to Apple — we can’t help ourselves. Like now.

A retraction might be the next tune for one Timothy Michael Poe, who has been a contestant on America’s Got Talent. According to the Associated Press, the aspiring country singer told the show’s judges that:

Come see Retraction Watch in Berlin

Ivan is on a public panel in Berlin at 7 p.m. on Wednesday night, November 2: ”Science 2.0 – More knowledge, more transparency, more quality? How Web 2.0 has changed science.”

Joining him in the discussion, which will be in English, are:

Report on pot and crime goes up in smoke as RAND retracts it

photo by Torbin Bjorn Hansen via Flickr http://flic.kr/p/4v9zbC

Maybe they just hallucinated it.

The RAND Corporation has retracted a study linking Los Angeles pot dispensaries to drops in crime, the Los Angeles Times reports. The problem: RAND hadn’t included data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The institute tells the Times, referring to RAND researchers:

“They made mistakes,” said Debra Knopman, a Rand vice president and director of the infrastructure, safety and environment division. “What we’re wrestling with is how the mistakes went undetected.”

The report was peer-reviewed, RAND said, and retractions are uncommon:

Upcoming Retraction Watch appearances: New York, St. Louis

If you’re a Retraction Watch reader in New York or St. Louis, come see Retraction Watch live. On Thursday, October 20, Ivan will be on a SONYC panel at Rockefeller University [please see update at end]. On the 25th, he’ll give a talk at the Danforth Center in St. Louis.

More info:

Tune to NPR this weekend to hear Retraction Watch on “On The Media”

This week’s episode of NPR’s “On The Media” features a conversation about retractions between Ivan and co-host Brooke Gladstone. You can listen online, or find a station that carries the program.

The show also includes an interview about retractions with Jonah Lehrer.

Earlier: Retraction Watch on NPR’s Science Friday. Listen here (with transcript).

Tune in to Science Friday today to hear Retraction Watch

It’s a nice way to celebrate our first anniversary this week: Ivan will appear today on Science Friday, the nationally syndicated NPR program hosted by Ira Flatow.

The segment, “If Science Takes A Wrong Turn, Who Rights It,” is part of the show’s first hour, at 2 p.m. Eastern. It will also feature Grant Steen, whose work we’ve covered.

You can listen online, or find a station near you that carries it, if you’re in the U.S. It’s live, so call in — you know we love hearing from Retraction Watch readers. It will also be archived on the site, so you can listen later.

Update, 5:15 Eastern, 8/5/11: Here’s that archived audio (top left corner).

Should we change our name to Mori Watch? Yet another retraction from cancer researcher

Earlier this week we reported on the latest retraction of an article by Naoki Mori, number 21 in a series. We could have waited a few days and saved ourselves some trouble.

The journal Leukemia Research has retracted a 2006 paper by Mori, titled “Curcumin suppresses constitutive activation of AP-1 by downregulation of JunD protein in HTLV-1-infected T-cell lines.” From the notice, which is behind a paywall:

So how often does medical consensus turn out to be wrong?

In a quote that has become part of medical school orientations everywhere, David Sackett, often referred to as the “father of evidence-based medicine,” once famously said: 

Half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half–so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own.

Sackett, we are fairly sure, was making an intentionally wild estimate when he said ”half.” [See note about these strikethroughs at bottom of post.]  But aA fascinating study out today in the Archives of Internal Medicine gives a clue as to the real figuresuggests that he may have been closer than any of us imagined.