The European Journal of Pharmacology has — against its will, it would seem — retracted a 2012 paper by a group of Chinese heart researchers embroiled in a what appears to be a rather messy authorship dispute.
The article, “The effect of alendronate on the expression of osteopontin and osteoprotegerin in calcified aortic tissue of the rat,” came from the Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at Tongji Hospital, part of of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
As the retraction notice states:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors due to a disagreement regarding authorship.
Jaap van Harten, executive publisher of the EJP, tells us that:
This dispute was brought to my attention by the authors themselves. They were unanimous in their request, and no matter what further clarifications I asked them, I did not get any further than that the authorship dispute was so serious that each of the authors explicitly informed me that the wanted to have the article retracted for that reason. Not very satisfactory, but the max I could do.
Indeed. We think van Harten did the right thing, given that all of the authors had a problem with the paper. But it would be nice to know what, in particular, the problem was, yes?
If the paper is otherwise sound science, it seems a shame to remove it from the literature. The whole point of publication is ultimately *not* for the authors’ credit (although we get graded/rewarded on that) but to contribute to knowledge so science can progress.