Year: 2010

Shifting gears: Occupational health journal pulls study linking shift work, age and sleep disorders

Blaming “data coding errors,” the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health has pulled an article linking shift work, age and sleeping problems.

The study was published four months ago, but managed in its brief lifespan to garner significant attention in the mainstream media and the blogosphere, although it has not been cited by any other papers. It comes alongside growing interest in the potential lnks between shift work and various health conditions including irritable bowel syndrome and breast cancer. Denmark even awards damages to shift workers who have developed the latter.

Ironically, the researchers, led by Philip Tucker, of Swansea University in Wales, U.K., had hoped to demonstrate the toll of shift work that previous studies were unable to show conclusively because of “methodological difficulties”: Continue reading Shifting gears: Occupational health journal pulls study linking shift work, age and sleep disorders

The shroud of retraction: Virology Journal withdraws paper about whether Christ cured a woman with flu

Jesus healing a bleeding woman, courtesy http://campus.belmont.edu/honors/CatPix/womanblood.jpg via Wikipedia

It takes decades, and even centuries, to overturn the Catholic canon of law, but medical journals move much more quickly: Just three weeks after the Virology Journal published a paper speculating that a woman described in the Bible as being “cured by our Lord Jesus Christ” had flu, the journal has apologized for ever posting it online.

After bemused — to put it mildly — reactions from bloggers Bob O’Hara (who alerted us to the retraction), P.Z. Myers, and Tara C. Smith, as well as questions from a journal reader, the journal’s editor, Robert F. Garry, posted a retraction to O’Hara’s blog, and in his own journal: Continue reading The shroud of retraction: Virology Journal withdraws paper about whether Christ cured a woman with flu

Double negatives: Four years later, a journal restores retracted headache paper

drawing by JD Fletcher via Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clusterhead.jpg

It might not be a first – although we can’t find another example — but a mental health journal has reinstated an article it retracted four years ago.

The retracted retraction notice appears in the August issue of the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, a BMJ title, and refers to a 2005 article describing an alarming case of treatment-related emotional problems in a patient with cluster headaches.

These headaches, which often strike behind the eyes, are akin to migraines and have been dubbed “suicide headaches” because they are so intensely painful that many sufferers have said that death would be a preferable fate. (Think: “It beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”)

The patient had been taking high doses of the drug methysergide and began to experience Continue reading Double negatives: Four years later, a journal restores retracted headache paper

Monkey business? 2002 Cognition paper retracted as prominent psychologist Marc Hauser takes leave from Harvard

Marc Hauser, a prominent Harvard psychology researcher and author, will be taking a leave of absence from the university following “a lengthy internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct in his laboratory” that has led to the retraction of one of his papers, according to The Boston Globe.

The retraction, of a 2002 paper in Cognition, reads, in part: “An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are retracting this article,” the Globe reports.  It also includes the sentence “MH accepts responsibility for the error.”

The retraction notice does not yet appear anywhere on the journal’s site, where the PDF version of the study is still available, nor on the Medline abstract. Its circumstances appear to be atypical, according to the Globe: Continue reading Monkey business? 2002 Cognition paper retracted as prominent psychologist Marc Hauser takes leave from Harvard

Science wants “reactome array” enzyme chip authors to retract paper

Following an investigation into an October 2009 study in Science that claimed to have proven the ability of a device to measure all of the enzyme activity in a cell at a particular time, the journal has asked the study’s authors to retract the paper, Science‘s news blog, ScienceInsider, reported on Friday.

The move comes after Bruce Alberts, Science‘s editor in chief, issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in December in response to concerns raised by other scientists

to alert our readers to thefact that serious questions have been raised about the methodsand data presented in this article. The questions focus in particularon the synthesis of the dye-labeled metabolites that are centralto the microarray technique. In addition, the spectroscopicdata the authors cite in support of their claim were not postedto the Bangor University School of Biological Sciences Web siteat the time of publication, despite the authors’ indicationin the Supporting Online Material that the data would be soposted. In response to inquiries from Science, the authors haveprovided new descriptions of the synthetic methods that differsubstantially from those in their published article. Based onour original concerns and the authors’ response, Science hasrequested evaluation of the original data and records by officialsat the authors’ institutions: These officials have agreed toundertake this task.

That evaluation, reported late last month by Nature, concluded Continue reading Science wants “reactome array” enzyme chip authors to retract paper

2005 PNAS Arabidopsis cold sensitivity gene paper retracted

There’s a retraction this week from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of a paper that first appeared online on July 1, 2005 (and which is still available, but notes under “this article” that “a retraction has been published”). The paper reports on a study that allegedly found a gene that made Arabidopsis plants — a favorite model of molecular biologists — “extremely sensitive to freezing temperatures, completely unable to acclimate to the cold,” and very sensitive to salt.

In other words, the Arabidopsis version of our relatives in Florida.

From the retraction:
Continue reading 2005 PNAS Arabidopsis cold sensitivity gene paper retracted

Redundancy, redux: Anesthesia journal retracts obesity paper in self-plagiarism case

Sometimes redundancy — the topic of our last post — is a failure of editors to adequately vet a manuscript. Other times, the blame falls more squarely on the authors.

Consider: In the August 2010 issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, a highly regarded specialty journal, five researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by Andrew Ochroch, made a remarkable confession.

Their article in the May issue of A&A on ventilation of patients recovering from bariatric surgery plagiarized a 2009 paper in a competing publication, Anesthesiology — written by the same group:

We sincerely apologize for the inappropriate and unacceptable intellectual overlap and self-plagiarism of our paper … published in Anesthesiology.

Sincere apologies are better, we suppose, than insincere ones. But, never mind. They go on: Continue reading Redundancy, redux: Anesthesia journal retracts obesity paper in self-plagiarism case

Department of Redundancy Department: From fish to toxicology, where have all the editors gone?

Photo by shaymus22 via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/shaymus22/

Readers of three science publications may be wondering, “Where in the world were the editors?” after retractions appeared recently in the journals sounding the same theme: The articles in question had too much “overlap” between previous publications.

For example, the Journal of Fish Biology notice reads, in part: “The retraction has been agreed due to overlap between this article and several previously published articles.”

Translation: Our bad!

The latest retraction notices from the journals Environmental Toxicology, the Journal of Fish Biology and the Journal of Clinical Neurology Continue reading Department of Redundancy Department: From fish to toxicology, where have all the editors gone?

Why write a blog about retractions?

Post by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus

The unfolding drama of Anil Potti — a Duke researcher who posed as a Rhodes Scholar and appears to have invented key statistical analyses in a study of how breast cancer responds to chemotherapy — has sent ripples of angst through the cancer community. Potti’s antics prompted editors of The Lancet Oncology to issue an “expression of concern” — a Britishism that might be better expressed as “Holy Shit!” — about the validity of a 2007 paper in their journal by Potti and others.

Unlike newspapers, which strive for celerity as much as accuracy, science journals have the luxury of time. Thorough vetting, through editorial boards, peer reviewers and other filters, is the coin of the realm.

And yet mistakes happen. Sometimes these slips are merely technical, requiring nothing more than an erratum notice calling attention to a backwards figure or an incorrect address for reprints. Less often but far more important are the times when the blunders require that an entire article be pulled. For a glossary of the spectrum between erratum and retraction — including expression of concern — see this piece, commissioned by one of us, Ivan, while he was at The Scientist.

Retractions are born of many mothers. Fraud is the most titillating reason, and mercifully the most rare, but when it happens the results can be devastating. Consider the case of Scott Reuben, a prodigiously dishonest anesthesiologist whose fabrications led to the retraction of more than a score of papers and deeply rattled an entire medical specialty. (One of us, Adam, broke that story.)

So why write a blog on retractions? Continue reading Why write a blog about retractions?