Caught Our Notice: When authors go MIA, the article may follow

Via Wikimedia

Title: IRF9 inhibits human acute myeloid leukemia through the SIRT1-p53 signaling pathway

What Caught Our Attention: When authors fail to respond to editors’ requests for information, it isn’t hard to imagine that the submitted manuscript will lose its publishing appeal. In this case, the journal and publisher withdrew the article after “repeated attempts” to contact the authors were unsuccessful.

The notice doesn’t say why the journal needed to get in touch with the authors; of course, some authors may cease correspondence for a variety of reasons, but there is usually some backstory. Since the authors disappeared, the withdrawn article has, as well.

Journal: FEBS Letters

Authors: Wen-Liang Tian, Rong Guo, Fang Wang, Zhong-Xing Jiang, Ping Tang, Yu-Min Huang and Ling Sun

Affiliations: Unknown (original article was withdrawn).

The Notice:

The above article from FEBS Letters, published online on the 18th of February 2017 in Wiley Online Library (http://wileyonlinelibrary.com) has been withdrawn by agreement between the Journal Managing Editor Felix Wieland and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., on behalf of the Federation of European Biochemical Sciences. The withdrawal has been agreed following repeated attempts by the journal and publisher to contact the authors regarding the publication of their article. Since no responses from the authors have been received the journal is unable to complete publication.

Date of Article: February 2017

Times Cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: Article not yet indexed

Date of Notice: September 25, 2017

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2 thoughts on “Caught Our Notice: When authors go MIA, the article may follow”

  1. all authors are from “Department of Hematology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan Province 450052, China”, the article is (still) available via sci-hub in a preprint version.

  2. The authors are: Wen-Liang Tian, Rong Guo, Fang Wang, Zhong-Xing Jiang, Ping Tang, Yu-Min Huang, Ling Sun

    Among them, Guo, Wang, Jiang, and Sun are all clinical professors at ZhengZhou university medical school. Huang looks like a Doctoral candidate by 2017.

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