We, the Editor and Publisher of the Nutritional Neuroscience, have retracted the following article:
Ali Akbar Mohammadi, Shima Jazayeri, Kianoush Khosravi-Darani, Zahra Solati, Nakisa Mohammadpour, Zatollah Asemi, Zohre Adab, Mahmoud Djalali, Mehdi Tehrani-Doost, Mostafa Hosseini & Shahryar Eghtesadi (2016), The effects of probiotics on mental health and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in petrochemical workers, Nutritional Neuroscience, 19:9, 387-395, DOI: 10.1179/1476830515Y.0000000023
Following publication, significant concerns were raised by a third party1 about the integrity of the data and the reported findings in the article.
When approached for an explanation, the authors and their institution have been cooperative in providing some original data and documents. In order to verify the reported findings, the article and the original data provided by the authors were sent for review by an external statistical reviewer.
Both the journal editorial team and the external statistical reviewer were unable to confirm the integrity of the trial design and the main outcome of the external review was that the article’s conclusions are incorrect. Therefore, as the editorial team no longer have confidence in the reported conclusions the decision has been made to retract the article.
The authors listed in the publication have been informed. The authors do not agree with the retraction.
We have been informed in our decision-making by our editorial policies and the COPE guidelines.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’.
Reference
- Bolland, M.J., Gamble, G.D., Grey, A. and Avenell, A. (2020), Empirically generated reference proportions for baseline p values from rounded summary statistics. Anaesthesia, 75: 1685-1687. https://doi.org/10.1111/anae.15165