We, the Editor-in-Chief and Publishers of the European Journal of Sport Science, retract the following article:
Matheus Barbalho, Victor Coswig, Rodolfo Raiol, James Fisher, James Steele, Antonino Bianco, Paulo Gentil, ‘Single joint exercises do not provide benefits in performance and anthropometric changes in recreational bodybuilders’, European Journal of Sport Science, 20:1, 72-79, DOI: 10.1080/17461391.2019.1611932
Two authors of the original article (James Fisher, and James Steele) raised questions regarding the data integrity and requested that it be retracted. Following data concerns raised in the published White Paper below, an external statistical review was undertaken.
Vigotsky, A. D., Nuckols, G. L., Fisher, J., Heathers, J., Krieger, J., Schoenfeld, B. J., Giessing, J., Steele, J. (2020, July 18). Improbable data patterns in the work of Barbalho et al. https://doi.org/10.31236/osf.io/sg3wm
The White Paper includes two authors who are also co-authors of the above paper by Barbalho et al., published in the European Journal of Sport Science (James Fisher, and James Steele). We informed all of the authors, as well as the first author’s institution, about these concerns, and invited them to respond. Having considered the evaluation report from the external review, as well as author and institutional responses, we find the data and findings in the article to be unreliable and invalid.
All authors have been informed of our decision to retract this article. The authors James Fisher, James Steele, and Antonino Bianco wish to record their agreement with the decision to retract to be noted within this retraction statement.
We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the guidance of COPE guidelines on retractions.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’.