Maybe it was a case of hitting the “send” button a bit too soon, or maybe it was a spasm of seller’s remorse, but a group of Chinese researchers has retracted a paper they’d published preliminarily a few months earlier.
The paper, “Antitumor and immunomodulatory activity of a polysaccharide from fungus Coprinus comatus (Mull.:Fr.) Gray,” by a group from various institutions in Shaanxi, appeared in April on the website of International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (as what appears to have been an uncorrected proof). But that didn’t stick.
According to a retraction notice dated August 2nd:
This article has been retracted at the request of Author.
The authors wish to withdraw this paper as some of the results presented have not been confirmed, and may be inaccurate. In addition not all of the authors agreed to the submission of the paper at this time. The authors apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused.
We’ve seen other cases in which not all the authors have agreed results are ready to publish. It strikes us that a policy of including all the “authors” on an email from the publisher — which some journals do — might head off some of these misfires.
At the journal I edit, we used to communicate only with the corresponding author. We changed this to notifying all named authors when a paper is submitted after experiencing a case of where one of the co-authors was unaware of a paper submitted with that co-author’s name until the paper was published.
Rob Siebers
Editor, New Zealand Journal of Medical Laboratory Science
Sounds like lab politics to me…