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I work in Health Sciences. I was rushed by my postdoc supervisor into finishing a paper that was important to them. I ended up committing many mistakes while copying the results of the analyses into the manuscript tables. This led to extensive corrections to the manuscript. Although the main conclusion of the paper remained the same, the editor retracted the paper due to the extension of the corrections. Co-authors are not happy. How do I deal with the negative feedback from the people affected by this retraction?

Edit: My paper has been retracted already. I originally made this question as a hypothetical possible retraction to avoid identifying myself.

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    who is the first author? Commented 17 hours ago
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    Did you use LLM (such as ChatGPT) to produce the tables? Commented 11 hours ago
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    Thanks for your clarifying edit. Can you further make clear whether the paper was published and then retracted, or if it was instead rejected in the peer review process? This seems to be the primary question commenters are asking for explanation about. Commented 6 hours ago
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    What does whether an LLM was used or not have to do with the question? Commented 4 hours ago
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    What exactly do you mean by "how do I deal with it?" Do you mean dealing with your own emotions, dealing with awkward conversations, dealing with their unwillingness to work with you / hire you / recommend you? Commented 2 hours ago

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If your job was to produce tables for a paper and you produced tables with the wrong numbers in them, you did your job poorly.

Having a problem with your job performance is not "hate", you've basically demonstrated that you cannot be trusted with this task.

Certainly data entry errors when copying tables are common; it's much preferred to use software to create tables from trusted data, and to audit raw data tables against other records at every stage. Possibly your supervisor should have informed you of these things and so shares some responsibility, but I think it should have been obvious to you from the start that the numbers needed to be correct, and given the editor's response and your description of how extensive the errors were, this goes beyond the normal expectations of inaccuracy where an occasional transposition or repeated value does happen. Also if you are a post doc already, it's expected that you have already learned such basic principles.

I'd advise taking responsibility, promise that you've learned from the incident, and commit to the promise to do better in the future. But, you can't control what other people think and taking responsibility can include negative consequences.

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    I agree that I did a poor job and take full responsibility. I have owned this responsibility to all co-authors. Thank you for the comment Commented 18 hours ago
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    @kfmir Most importantly - do better in the future. Commented 12 hours ago
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As mentioned in other answers, this is not hate. The word “hate” is very strong in an academic context. People are simply professionally irritated by the mistake. That is all.

There can be misreporting issues in data, such as numbers in a table. This happens quite often, sometimes involving very serious mistakes. Unless there is academic misconduct or a violation of academic integrity, you should not worry too much. Of course, this situation is quite annoying for you and for your co-authors, but errors do happen, and many well-established scholars are not free from them.

I do not think that you have ruined your career or anyone else’s. A useful piece of advice would be to disclose the error(s) in a transparent way. If these errors do not require changes to your methodology and/or do not alter your results in a qualitatively significant way, you should clearly state that this is a simple case of misreporting, with no intention to mislead or misrepresent the results of your work.

One last word: if you co-author a paper with your supervisor, then she/he is also expected to check your contributions. Of course, this may vary depending on the research culture or discipline. In this situation, you should assume responsibility for your mistake, but your supervisor should also acknowledge his/her role in the process.

Based on my personal experience, at the time my supervisor took responsibility in front of my defense jury when they identified a conceptual mistake and said that he was sorry for having overlooked the error.

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    From the post, this does not sound like an "errors do happen" type of error. It seems that there is a rather large number of mistakes, not just one or two small errors, and it feels that this is since the OP has been lacking due diligence. I would probably not work again with the OP after such an incident, unless they would provide a clear explanation of why this happened, which would convince me that this would not happen again. Commented 12 hours ago
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    Note that this is not about a conceptual mistake, but - apparently - about numerous mistakes in copying data from a source to the paper. I disagree that it is the supervisor's job to check each and every singe number in a paper against the data source. If this were necessary, the supervisor could do the work on their own. This is a level at which a PhD student or postdoc is expected to do reliable work. Commented 12 hours ago
  • If the reported numbers are inaccurate but the analysis is based on the correct values, then the OP’s question is not clear enough. I also think it is the supervisor’s responsibility if those numbers could significantly change the results and call into question the validity of the paper. Commented 12 hours ago
  • Also, an editor would not retract a paper if the analysis were conducted using the correct calibration or values and the only issue were the reporting of values in a table. In that case, there would simply be a corrigendum, and that would be all. If this is the case, I think it is way too much pressure to put on an early-career scholar. Commented 12 hours ago
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    @optimalcontrol "I ended up committing many mistakes while copying the results of the analyses into the manuscript tables ... Although the main conclusion of the paper remains the same" Uh this seems pretty clear to me? OP says they made many errors copying numbers to tables in the manuscript. Errors like this in a manuscript in the health sciences are unfortunately common, but the extent here sounds unusual. Remember that health studies are often used in meta analyses, so numbers in a table become data for someone else, and wrong numbers can then lead to wrong standards of care. Commented 8 hours ago
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You did not destroy someone else career. If at all, which is highly doubtful, it's your supervisors fault. It's exactly the job of a supervisor to check and correct every publication produced by their mentee. It's there job the first few times to read every draft and pay special attention to the final product. They have to blame themselves.

No for the hate part: Depends on the persons involved. My experience: People dump their emotional trash where they think it's most convenient for them. So if you calmly but sternly state that you own up precisely for your mistakes and not more, and do repeatedly so, you will likely not become a convenient emotional trash pile.

But think long and hard: Do you really want to learn form a supervisor who is emotionally not stable enough for the job and does also not take their responsibilities as a supervisor seriously? Do you really want to work in a group where there is such awful error culture?

And finally, if people are so immature that they cannot handle such an incident professionally, you might not get the necessary support every early career scientists need. Depending on your circumstances, you may find greener pastures somewhere else.

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    I don't think it's reasonable to expect a supervisor to check that all values are copied correctly into a table; at some point you have to trust a student and here the student failed that trust. And for a post doc on a difficult job market, having one of their key papers retracted does probably hurt their chances of the next position. Commented 18 hours ago
  • Thank you for the comment and for being understanding. I do agree that I made a terrible mistake and now have to deal with this on my own. I have already left that lab due to toxic work culture, but now I think I will have difficulty finding a new position. Commented 18 hours ago
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    I do not agree with Bryan’s comment. If the values in such a table could lead to a retraction of the paper, then the supervisor has a responsibility to check them. It is even more concerning if the supervisor was not aware of the importance of this table. Commented 12 hours ago
  • The rest of this discussion has been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on Academia Meta, or in Academia Chat. Comments continuing discussion may be removed. Commented 2 hours ago
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the editor was not happy with these corrections and said that might be further actions

Um, what? The editor has to ultimately chose between one of only two possible outcomes: publish or reject. There is no other option. If they choose to publish it, they don't get to change their mind later. There are no further actions they can take.

If your coauthors are unhappy with the paper that they have put their name to then that is their problem, not yours. A general rule for academia is don't let people pretend that they can push responsibility for their decisions onto you.

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    This is not correct. It's entirely possible for an editor to have a paper retracted after it's published, with or without the consent of the authors. However, it's unclear from the question whether it actually has been published already. Commented 15 hours ago
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    "Correction" is typically something done post-publication when a paper is found to contain errors. "Revision" is the process of making changes during the publication process, before a paper is accepted. Of course it's possible the language used in OP is unclear/misleading. Commented 13 hours ago

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