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Last week I raised the issue of a retraction epidemic, pointing to an editorial in Nature and wondering about the question of publicity for retractions, an issue brought to my attention by Ivan Oransky.

There was another high profile retraction last week, from Science: Reactome array: Forging a link between metabolome and genome(h/t Chemistry World’s blog). We’ve covered this at The Scientist previously, including a Q&A with Richard Roberts, CSO of New England BioLabs. But what’s interesting from our point of view is what happened to the this paper on F1000.

Ben Davis at the University of Oxford first evaluated the paper a year ago, a few weeks after its publication. Ben starts off effusively— If this worked it could be marvellous, superb—but then strikes a cautionary note:

this work should be read with some caveats. Try as we might, my group, as well as many colleagues, and I have tried to determine the chemistry described … but questions remain. For example, it is unclear how the authors chemically generated such a large substrate library.

Then of course, just after Science published its Expression of Concern, first Michael Gelb (UoW) and then David Cane (Brown University) published dissenting evaluations. David writes (my emphasis):

My colleagues and I have tried to decipher the chemistry shown in Figure 1 of the main text and in the supplemental material. Many of the indicated reactions seem highly unlikely to occur, and the NMR data showing that some of the structures that were made are confusing and controversial. I would encourage chemical biologists to read this paper and draw your own conclusions.

Which is a pretty strong way of saying “Guys, this doesn’t add up.” Ben replied with tacit agreement.

Dissents are reasonably uncommon at F1000, but for us they are as essential as expressions of concern, and indeed retractions, in the scientific process. (You can find a list of all dissents on F1000 with this handy link: https://bit.ly/F1000dissent.) They drive home the point that science doesn’t not proceed inexorably in quantum increments. Every piece of work; every paper; every table or figure or dataset can and should be challenged. Progress is sometimes backwards, or sideways, or diverted down a B road for a while. Yes, it’s frustrating, and can be utterly disheartening for the scientists involved, but these questions, these dissents and retractions demonstrate that the system works, more or less.

And because we think that this conversation is so important, in the new F1000 website (you knew we had one, right?) we’ve provided the facility for subscribers to make comments on evaluated papers (oh all right then, another handy link for you: https://bit.ly/F1000comment). Any signed-in subscriber can comment on the papers we evaluate, so go on, tell us what you think.

You should probably read the Terms & Conditions first, but they’re not onerous.