Two researchers at the University of Maryland who retracted a paper earlier this year for a duplicated figure have withdrawn another, this time for unknown reasons.
The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) paper has been cited 16 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice, for “Hsp90 Interaction with INrf2(Keap1) Mediates Stress-induced Nrf2 Activation,” which is unfortunately a return to the JBC’s opacity:
This article has been withdrawn by the authors.
The study was supported by an NIH grant. We’ve asked Jaiswal for details, and will update with anything we learn.
It galls me that the researchers involved in a retracted study rarely have to repay any of their NIH grant funding, and their institutions also don’t have to refund any of their share.
Are there any private research foundations that require their grants to be repaid if one or more of a funded study’s papers are subsequently retracted for fraud or misconduct?
Rather interesting the first author seems to be a postdoc and over a few years has published several first author papers including in JBC. Very ‘productive’ indeed!
Ivanoransky: May be JBC does not want to disclose the shortcomings of their reviewers in detecting the manipulations initially, which of course is unfortunate. These things happen with the practice of reviewing the manuscripts by friends, if not monitored properly. Sometimes this opacity is better than publishing misleading statements that indirectly affects the work of other labs especially when they try to reproduce the data. Whom should the PI believe? His own lab member’s inability or the published data from a ‘reputed’ laboratory? The journal should take up the initiative to edit these deceitful retraction statements like duplication of a figure as the sole reason to retract the previous paper, which we now know is not true. Please see the comments on the earlier retraction
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/02/21/figure-duplication-kills-cell-death-paper/
Third retraction.
http://www.jbc.org/content/289/32/22019.full
Was there ever any feedback from Anil K Jaiswal?