Statement regarding recent retractions.

On January 17 2020, a paper by Kate L. Laskowski, Pierre-Olivier Montiglio, and Jonathan N. Pruitt was retracted for “irregularities in the raw data.” Today, another paper by Kate Laskowski and Jonathan Pruitt has been retracted. In the last two weeks, since learning about these retractions and the reasons underlying them (detailed by Kate Laskowski here), we past students, postdocs, and collaborators* of Jonathan Pruitt have been grappling with this professionally and emotionally fraught situation. We have all been engaged in a close examination of every piece of data we’ve ever been handed by Jonathan Pruitt. We have been working day and night to uncover all irregularities and communicate with the relevant journal editors;  issues that appear similar to those described here have already been identified in several datasets. Many of us have also published papers co-authored with Jonathan Pruitt for which we collected the data ourselves–we stand by the veracity of these data that we have collected ourselves, and the resultant papers. 

We would like to assure the scientific community that we are committed to setting the scientific record straight. This will take time but the right thing will be done. If the data and results of a paper are found to be untrustworthy or un-reproducible, it will be retracted. In the meantime, we ask for your patience and understanding as we navigate the difficult situation that we are now faced with. 

We welcome the entire community to alert us to findings that would help set the scientific record straight by approaching the paper authors directly, so that the situation can be processed through the proper channels at our respective institutions and with the journals.

Respectfully, 

Noa Pinter-Wollman

Nicholas DiRienzo

Colin M. Wright

James L. L. Lichtenstein

Ambika Kamath

*Several co-authors who have been fully engaged in this process are unable to comment publicly at this time.