What Caught Our Attention: Cornell food marketing researcher Brian Wansink, the one-time media darling who has been dogged by mounting criticism of his findings, has lost another paper to retraction. As we’ve noted in the past, corrections for Wansink’s work tend to be long. This time, “the number of errors is too voluminous to be executed by issuing a correction statement,” according to the retraction notice for a paper about behaviors following weight loss surgery.
That makes eight retractions for Wansink — including two of the same paper, after the journal retracted a revised version — along with 15 corrections.
Of note: The second author on the paper, Michal Ann Strahilevit, lists her affiliation as the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University.
Journal: Bariatric Surgical Practice and Patient Care
Authors: Anna-Leena Vuorinen, Michal Ann Strahilevit, Brian Wansink , Debra L Safer
Affiliations: VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, Finland; Duke University, North Carolina, USA; Cornell University, New York, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California.
The Editor of Bariatric Surgical Practice and Patient Care is officially withdrawing the article entitled Shifts in the Enjoyment of Healthy and Unhealthy Behaviors Affect Short- and Long-Term Postbariatric Weight Loss, by Vuorinen et al., published in the journal in volume 12, number 1, pages 35–42, due to a significantly high number of statistical errors in the tables found by the authors after publication.
After the editorial leadership of the journal reviewed the circumstances and discussed it with the authors, it was determined that the inaccuracies stemmed primarily from a statistical and reporting/formatting error that led to further inaccuracies. The review found that there was no intended deception or evidence of deliberate misconduct, and that the significance of the results and discussion in the article would not change because of the errors. However, since the number of errors is too voluminous to be executed by issuing a correction statement, the journal is withdrawing the article and will republish it as a corrected version in a subsequent issue, and will utilize the same DOI as the originally published version of the article. The authors agree with this decision. The republished article will carry a footnote on the title page informing readers of the date of republication, and will include a link to this withdrawal statement
Bariatric Surgical Practice and Patient Care is committed to upholding the highest standards of scientific peer review and publishing, and the community it serves.
Date of Article: March 2017
Times Cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: Zero
Date of Notice: March 2018
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Thank you for correctly identifying him as a ‘food marketing researcher’- and for continuing to shine a light on this.