Extreme original data yield extreme decline effects.

Clements et al. respond to Munday's claim that his "reanalysis shows there is not an extreme decline effect in fish ocean acidification studies". They contend that extreme data reported in early studies authored by Dixson and Munday indeed result in an "extreme" decline effect in this field, and conclude that the decline effect is primarily driven by papers by particular authors.

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Copyright: © 2023 Clements et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Three of the authors (J.S., T.D.C, and F.J.) have previously raised concerns about, and were involved in formal investigations into, the scientific integrity of some studies published by Drs. Philip Munday and/or Danielle Dixson. All authors professionally dispute the validity of many studies on fish behavior led by Drs. Munday and/or Dixson. A recent, formal investigation by the University of Delaware concluded data fabrication in multiple papers with Dr. Dixson as an author [4,9], one of which is now retracted [10]. A Preliminary Assessment by James Cook University (JCU) dismissed allegations and decided against launching a formal investigation into Drs. Dixson or Munday (the former was the PhD student of the latter at JCU). Nature Climate Change is aware of extensive data duplications in Munday et al. (2014) [Nature Clim. Change 4, 487-492]; their most recent correspondence indicates that the journal is investigating this paper. Ongoing investigations are being conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Office of Research Integrity in association with the National Institutes of Health (USA), the National Science Foundation (USA), and several scientific journals. Our group has yet to be provided with the conclusions of these investigations.