Early last month, evolutionary biologist Nicole King and postdoctoral fellow Jacob Steenwyk retracted their paper in the journal Science1. King was shaken when she realized that the paper ' which attempted to use a new data-analysis approach to work out which animal lineages were the first to emerge on Earth ' had serious technical errors. But the decision was still clear: 'If you know you made a mistake, you've got to reverse it,' she says. Retractions, which have long been associated with misconduct or poor scientific practice, can carry a lot of stigma. As of a decade ago, only about 22% of retractions resulted from authors self-reporting errors2, rather than other scientists raising concerns to journals. Authors whose papers are retracted often stop publishing, especially if the retractions are well publicized3. So King, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, was pleasantly surprised to see some scientists celebrating her decision online. 'One reason for loving...
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