Ep. 270 - Scientific Retractions Aren’t Working

Iron Culture

The MASS Crew

Sports & Recreation, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 827 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We here at Iron Culture have been on a mission to better inform you, dear listener, as to the inner workings of science. From what goes on in the lab itself, to the publication process, to dissemination, to eventual meta-analysis, the challenge of interpretation and communication of science, the optimistic promises of open science, and the increasing focus on replication, it’s been a hopefully eye-opening and overall encouraging discussion. However, while the scientific method is inherently self-correcting, the apparatus of science is far from perfect and there is a big problem with its principle tool of correcting the peer-reviewed record: retraction. What leads to a paper being retracted? What is the process? How does it impact the literature? Most importantly, does it effectively change the understanding of the science in the community the studies are meant to serve? Join the Erics in this most recent episode as they break it all down!

00:00 Retraction in science and a recently retracted study on cold water immersion

Néma 2024 Impact of cold exposure on life satisfaction and physical composition of soldiershttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36599485/

Iron Culture Ep. 267- Addressing Data Fraud in Nutrition Science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqQ0_pweTs

16:00 A peak behind the sport science curtain

25:19 The process of retraction and its flaws

Soria-Gila 2015 Effects of Variable Resistance Training on Maximal Strength: A Meta-Analysishttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25968227/

Retraction Watch https://retractionwatch.com/

41:15 Keeping up to date with retractions and critically appraising studies

Wakefield 1998 Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9500320/

1:00:54 Wild claims from science communicators and their responsibility

1:11:09 Letter to the editor and the retraction process

Phillips 2017 Changes in body composition and performance with supplemental HMB-FA+ATPhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28301440/

1:22:53 The open science movement and the dangers of unreliable findings

1:30:04 Moving forward: the effective science communicatorand alternative publishing models

1:39:16 Closing out this intervention episode for Helms

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dr. Trexler.
0:01.8	Dr. Helps?
0:04.7	Science isn't doing a good job.
0:07.8	Scientists are doing a great job, but I agree.
0:11.0	Science is floundering.
0:14.1	It is.
0:15.0	And we're trying.
0:17.3	We've been doing a series of podcast episodes here to respond to the common man, because we in the ivory tower can't really relate to them. But to respond to the common man's concerns that science is not useful. It's not applicable. It's invalid. It's conspiracy. And also, despite being an ivory tower conspiracy,
0:40.0	it's constantly disagreeing with itself and always flip flopping and we should throw the whole thing out.
0:46.0	So, um, though in all seriousness, um, this episode is going to be a nice piece, a nice companion
0:53.9	piece to our previous one where we discussed
0:55.9	Brian Wan Singh's saga and the importance of replication and how essentially science does act
1:03.3	to self-correct. But the unfortunate thing is that in the modern social media podcast and fast news kind of space that we all operate in,
1:14.9	that correction is sometimes contained within the halls of science, if you will.
1:20.8	And if at all, it makes it out into the public sector.
1:25.1	It is in a much smaller magnitude or volume compared to the original misconception that existed.
1:35.7	So we're going to get into the specific issues of retraction, which we hinted out in the issue, sorry, in the discussion we had about Brian Wancick, we talked about, hey, a bunch of his data was retracted for these reasons, and now we actually have efforts to replicate that data.
1:52.3	We talked a lot about replication, but we didn't talk about what is often the first step for some of these replications, where there was something kind of nefarious going on or
2:01.7	there's clear mistrust of data, the retraction process or even a letter to the editor or message
2:07.3	of concern. So, Eric, you are writing about this in a forthcoming issue of mass, specifically about
2:14.1	a relatively well-known article that was popularized. We'll get into who and how it was
2:19.6	popularized in the metrics, but it became very popular, something that a lot of people were talking
	...

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