Erratum: Hurst, Saunders, & Coleman (2020)

Several expressions of concern have been received with regard to a paper published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism (IJSNEM) (Hurst et al., 2020a). Specifically, readers have questioned the accuracy of the nitrate dose reported in that paper (4.1 mmol), since the formulation of the stated product (Beet It Sport ®; James White Drinks Ltd) would have provided 400 mg of nitrate in the 70 ml volume that was ingested (i.e. ∼6.4 mmol). The paper describes data for 70 participants, who are a subset taken from a wider sample of 103 participants whose data were presented at an eralier conference (Hurst et al., 2015)-although those conference proceedings in BJSM describe a dose of only 4 mg purportedly ingested 2 h prior to exercise (as opposed to 2.5 h pre-exercise as was reported in IJSNEM). Whilst certain demographic data match either exactly or very closely between these two reports (e.g. previous running experience and personal best performances), other data vary considerably. For example, participants in the earlier report are almost 10 years older than those in the IJSNEM paper, with little change in the standard deviation (mean [SD] age: 41 [11] versus 33 [12] years, respectively). A further report of data from this same study but using a different subset of 41 participants (although reported as n=70) was published in EJSS (Hurst et al., 2020b) and demonstrates further inconsistencies (e.g. mean [SD] age: 32 [10] years).