Archive for the ‘pulmonology’ Category
Another paper by Duke pair with 12+ retractions is flagged
Another expression of concern (EOC) has appeared for a pair of lung researchers formerly employed by Duke University.
Co-authors Erin Potts-Kant, a research assistant who left the school and was charged with embezzlement, and Michael Foster, who has retired, share more than a dozen retractions, corrections and EOCs.
Like many of those papers, the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine is being flagged over concerns it is “unreliable.” Here’s more from the EOC:
Duke researcher adds another retraction in JCI, bringing count to 15
We’ve found another retraction for Erin Potts-Kant, a former researcher at Duke, bringing her total to 15.
Yesterday we reported on two new retractions for Potts-Kant in PLoS ONE, which earned her a spot in the top 30 on our leaderboard. As with the others, the latest paper, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, is marred by “unreliable” data.
Here’s the retraction notice for “In utero supplementation with methyl donors enhances allergic airway disease in mice“:
Duke pulmonary researcher up to 14 retractions, putting her on our leaderboard
A pair of Duke researchers who each have more than 10 retractions have earned some more.
Both of the newly retracted papers — originally published in 2012 by PLOS ONE — list Erin Potts-Kant as a co-author; one includes her former supervisor, Michael Foster, as lead author. The pair has since left Duke (Potts-Kant was arrested for using school credit cards to shop at the likes of Target, and Foster retired). The reason provided for these retractions will be familiar to anyone who’s been following their case — there were “concerns about the reliability” of the data.
By our count, Potts-Kant now has 14 retractions, making her one of the few women to hold a position on our leaderboard.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Iron Supplementation Decreases Severity of Allergic Inflammation in Murine Lung,” a paper that lists both Foster and Potts-Kant as authors:
Five more notices for Duke pulmonary pair brings retraction tally into double digits
Two retractions and three corrections have appeared for a group of Duke researchers that already have 10+ retractions under their belts.
The reasoning behind them echoes that which we’ve seen before in notices for Michael Foster and Erin Potts-Kant: Following an inquiry from the university, the journals were informed that some of the data or results weren’t reliable, and not all of the experiments could be repeated.
A colleague aware of the case said that researchers are still working to repeat experiments from papers by Potts-Kant and Foster. It is not known how many more papers might be corrected or retracted. Duke University is fully supporting the validation of these experiments, the source told us.
Foster has retired from Duke, a spokesperson for the university confirmed. Read the rest of this entry »
Corrections chip away at asbestos paper for conflicts of interest, “misleading” citation
The journal Epidemiology Biostatistics and Public Health has issued back-to-back corrections for a 2015 paper after the authors failed to disclose conflicts of interest with the asbestos industry and included an “erroneous citation.”
The mistaken citation was more than just a clerical error, critics argue — it undermines one of the key arguments of the paper, “Critical reappraisal of Balangero chrysotile and mesothelioma risk,” which disputes claims that an asbestos mine in northwest Italy was responsible for numerous cases of an aggressive form of cancer called mesothelioma. The authors, led by Edward Ilgren formerly of Oxford University, claim that “myriad sources” of other forms of asbestos—rather than the asbestos produced at the mine, called chrysotile—exist in the region “to account for the alleged cases.”
However, according to a recently added correction, the citation does not support one of the authors’ claims about how other forms of asbestos arrived at the mine area.
CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a correction notice to a report about formaldehyde in laminate flooring, saying a mistake had caused them to significantly underestimate the health risks.
The mistake: According to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the CDC sometimes didn’t convert feet to meters. Ouch.
In the corrected report, the agency estimates the health risks of the laminate flooring — by irritating the ear, nose and throat — to be three-fold higher than what they suggested in the original report, published February 10.
Here’s the note that now appears in the link to the original CDC report: Read the rest of this entry »
Johns Hopkins investigation leads to retraction of two lung papers, one highly cited
An investigation at Johns Hopkins University has uncovered several issues with the figures in two papers on a lung disease linked to smoking, one of which is highly cited.
The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine is retracting both papers, which examine the role of protein NRF2 in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. But both contain spliced and duplicated figures, among other issues.
Both papers — which share a total of five authors — received an expression of concern in 2014, after the corresponding author noticed anomalies in the figures. That same year, PubPeer commenters had begun raising questions about some of the figures in one of the papers.
A spokesperson for Johns Hopkins declined to say whether the investigation considered if the errors were the result of misconduct.
All authors agreed with the retraction, except for one who couldn’t be located. Here’s more from the retraction note for both papers:
List of retractions, corrections grows for Duke researchers
Duke researcher Michael Foster and his former co-author Erin Potts-Kant are adding to their notice count with a major correction from late last year to a paper on how certain cells in mice respond to a pneumonia infection, citing “potential discrepancies in the data.”
The correction is actually a partial retraction: The note explains that parts of three figures should be discounted.
We’ve also recently unearthed multiple corrections and two retractions from the pair that we missed from earlier in 2015.
After questions about the data in the corrected paper arose, the authors were able to replicate most of the experiments in the paper, according to the note. But since the paper was published, the senior author passed away, closing her lab, so they couldn’t repeat all of the work.
Here’s the correction notice for “Mast cell TNF receptors regulate responses to Mycoplasma pneumoniae in surfactant protein A (SP-A)−/− mice,” published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology:
We have a new record: 80 years from publication to retraction
We have a new record for the longest time from publication to retraction: 80 years. It’s for a case report about a 24-year-old man who died after coughing up more than four cups of what apparently looked — and smelled — like pee.
According to the case report titled “Een geval van uroptoë” published in 1923, an autopsy revealed that the man had a kidney that was strangely located in his chest cavity. A case of pneumonia caused the kidney to leak urine into the space around his lungs, leading to the perplexing cough.
If that sounds too crazy to be true, you’re right: This man never existed. The case was retracted in 2003. (Yes, we are a little late to this one — it recently popped up in one of our Google alerts.)
A write-up by the editors of the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde — that translates to “Dutch Journal of Medicine” — explains that the strange case was a fake (on the fifth page of this PDF, in English):
Plagiarism was “not an intentional act,” says first author of retracted TB paper
A 2013 review article about tuberculosis is being retracted for “unacknowledged re-use of significant portions of text” from another article, which the first author said wasn’t intentional.
Sayantan Ray, based at Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata in India, told us that “most of the unchanged text” is present in sections written by junior co-authors. Since there doesn’t appear to be any attempt to cover it up, he argued anyone responsible for the plagiarism must not have realized it was wrong:
You can appreciate that this type of obvious similarity can only happen when the concerned person [does] not have any idea about [the] plagiarism issue.
According to the notice, published by Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management, most of the re-used text appears to have come from a 2012 paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Research. Here’s more from the notice:
