Paper retracted on legal grounds

Statement by University of Queensland Acting Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan.

The University of Queensland has been advised that a publication on which a UQ researcher is one of four co-authors has been retracted by an academic journal for what appear to be legal reasons.

The paper, titled Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, was published in Frontiers in Psychology in March 2013 and retracted this week.

UQ Global Change Institute researcher Mr John Cook was one of the paper’s four authors.

The journal said a “small number of complaints” had led to a “detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work”.

It stated: “This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article.”

The University of Queensland notes that retraction of the paper has arisen solely as a consequence of the journal’s legal considerations.

Media contact: Corporate Relations Manager Carolyn Varley, +617 3365 1120, c.varley@uq.edu.au.