This revelation went viral, or possibly bacterial, a couple of years ago when research from Wansink's 'Food and Brand Lab' at Cornell was published. I didn't at first recognise his name (despite its anagram potential) but did recall one of his more famous findings – that people will take smaller helpings of food when given smaller plates. These few words became the killer blow to a once-glittering academic and media career and have highlighted, once again, the hubris that can attach itself to the celebrity scientist.Įach of these six peer-reviewed papers, withdrawn from journals with impact factors as high as 47.66, had two or three authors – but clearly it was Professor Wansink who was in the firing line. have retracted six articles that included Brian Wansink, PhD, of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, as author' it stated.

This is precisely what happened last month when JAMA (which used to be known as the Journal of the American Medical Association but now seems determined to follow the inexplicable modern trend of disguising its identity and purpose) issued a terse 'media advisory' (don’t get me started on the use of adjectives as a nouns). What is uncommon is for a number of publications to be retracted simultaneously, and for the retractions to identify a single specific author. Graphs and images misplaced or mislabelled, arithmetical mistakes (we've all hit a wrong key at some point), individuals or institutions misidentified. It can happen for a variety of reasons, many of which are due to innocent human blunders. It's not common for a scientific paper to be retracted.

As an academic high-flyer comes crashing down, we really should have seen this coming says Russ Swan.

Dangers of data dredging