Jesús A. Lemus, the Spanish veterinary researcher whose work has been the subject of a misconduct inquiry, has another retraction for his CV. It’s his third, according to our count.
The newest retraction is from PLoS ONE:
Juan A. Fargallo, Pablo Vergara, Deseada Parejo and Eva Banda, as co-authors of the article published in PLOS ONE (2010) titled “Natural Cross Chlamydial Infection between Livestock and Free-Living Bird Species”, request the retraction of this publication.
The Ethics Committee of the Spanish Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) has carried out an investigation in relation to concerns about potential scientific misconduct by Jesús A. Lemus, who was also a co-author of this article. The investigation has questioned the validity of the laboratory analyses conducted by Dr. Lemus in relation to this study, and was unable to establish at which laboratories the analyses were conducted.
Specifically, the authors have been unable to verify the validity of the Chlamydophila analyses for sheep abortions, sheep faeces, sheep stable dust, kestrel nest dust and insects. There are also concerns about the validity of the results obtained for the Chlamydophila serovar characterization, genetic diversity and MSLT analyses for Chamydophila. As a result, the authors wish to retract the article.
The paper, which has been cited 12 times, according to Google Scholar, is Lemus’s second PLoS ONE retraction. The other was in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
one hast to wonder… even though the experiments were performed by the majority of the authors (according to the “Contributions” section of the paper) they now are not able to reproduce any of their findings? If this is due to misconduct of one person, what exactly did the other authors do when performing the experiments?
They said: do it.
If the experiments mentioned in the retraction cover all of the paper’s experiments, this is a very valid question. But isn’t it possible that these represent only the portion in which Lemus was involved?