Episode description
What led to a recent series of research paper retractions in behavioral ecology? How do scientists trust the data their collaborators share? Earlier this year, several journals retracted papers using data collected by the biologist, Jonathan Pruitt, data that upon inspection were found to have several problems. On this episode, we talk with Dan Bolnick, Editor-in-Chief of The American Naturalist, one of the journals involved in the retractions. We talked with Dan about how he and others discovered the problems, the current status of the investigation, and the consequences of the flawed data for other authors on the retracted papers and the field as a whole. Check out our website, bigbiology.org, for more resources on this topic. Episode art: Bernard Dupont (CC BY-SA 2.0)