From Vox:
A top Cornell food researcher has had 13 studies retracted. That’s a lot.
It’s every scientist’s worst nightmare: six papers retracted in a single day, complete with a press release to help the world’s science reporters disseminate and discuss the news.
That’s exactly what happened Wednesday at the journal network JAMA, and to the Cornell researcher Brian Wansink.
Wansink has been the director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab. For years, he has been known as a “world-renowned eating behavior expert.”
On Thursday, Cornell announced that a faculty committee found Wansink “committed academic misconduct,” and that he would retire from the university on June 30, 2019. In the meantime, Wansink “has been removed from all teaching and research,” Cornell University provost Michael Kotlikoff said in a statement. Wansink will spend his remaining time at the university cooperating in an “ongoing review of his prior research.”
Sheesh - JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) is the Mt. Everest of medical journals. A bit more about him:
Even if you’ve never heard of Wansink, you’re probably familiar with his ideas. His studies, cited more than 20,000 times, are about how our environment shapes how we think about food, and what we end up consuming. He’s one of the reasons Big Food companies started offering smaller snack packaging, in 100 calorie portions. He once led the USDA committee on dietary guidelines and influenced public policy. He helped Google and the US Army implement programs to encourage healthy eating.
And some of his "findings"
Thirteen of Wansink’s studies have now been retracted, including the six pulled from JAMA Wednesday. Among them: studies suggesting people who grocery shop hungry buy more calories; that preordering lunch can help you choose healthier food; and that serving people out of large bowls encourage them to serve themselves larger portions.
Quite a lot more at the article - they go into the problems with the papers - specifically p-hacking the statistics to yield results that were what the researcher wanted to find. Another example of this is Dr. Mann's (in)famous "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. He finally released his math after more than a decade and to nobody's great surprise, you can feed random numbers into his analysis and generate hockey sticks.
Anyway, good riddance to bad science and he did the honorable thing by stepping down.
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