Pamela Ronald, researcher at the University of California, Davis (and blogger at Scientific American) has outlined why a paper she contributed to in Science was retracted. No, it was not fraud or misconduct, this was retracted by the authors because they could not consistently reproduce the results of a key factor in their conclusion.
Okay, retractions happen, what is interesting is that we get a thought process; redoing all of the experiments would take almost as long as the original study but if their conclusion was flawed, they didn't want it out there being cited. But a hasty retraction isn't productive either. She has a post going up on the details at her Scientific American blog tomorrow but you can read more at Pamela Ronald does the right thing again, retracting a Science paper on Retraction Watch.
H/T Bora Zivkovic
