The timing on a recent retraction of a paper from Biotechnology and Bioengineering makes it a bit difficult to figure out what happened, but here’s a try.
An article first published online May 16th by a group of researchers at Brown University was retracted on June 1st, apparently because a new and better method for analyzing the data was developed…at some point.
The timeline is not exactly clear from the retraction, though we’ve reached out to the author and publisher and will update with any new information.
Here’s the (paywalled) notice for “High-level production of 3-hydroxypropionatein Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae by introducing part of the 3-hydroxypropionate/4-hydroxybutyrate cycle from Metallosphaera sedula”:
Retraction: Liu, Z., Wang, Y., Deng, Z. and Liu, T. (2014), High-level production of 3-hydroxypropionatein Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae by introducing part of the 3-hydroxypropionate/4-hydroxybutyrate cycle from Metallosphaera sedula. Biotechnol. Bioeng. doi: 10.1002/bit.25275
The above article, published as an accepted article online on May 16, 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor-in-Chief, Douglas Clark, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been requested by the author due to the development of an improved method for quantitative analysis of 3-hydroxypropionic acid in the author’s laboratory, which invalidated the previously determined titer. Some experiments cannot be repeated by the first author himself nor other people in the lab. As a responsible research group, the authors do not wish to mislead readers and they will report their new data obtained with the use of a new method.
Hat tip: Marco de Weert
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Seems clear enough; retracted for methodological reasons because of failure of method used.
I disagree. Something sounds fishy. Why is it that, only once the paper was online, the authors suddenly found a new method that annulled or contradicted their previous method? It’s not like methods are developed in a matter of days or even weeks. A clue to the time-line may be found in the submitted, accepted and revisions submitted dates, if these are available. Just because a method doesn’t work, does this mean that the paper has to be retracted? Of course the retractophiles love to see the numbers go up, but we have to question the validity of the retraction, too, even if by the authors. Science is an evolving “being”, so a method today might be invalid tomorrow, simply because of the strength of the new method. Thus, even if their paper with an invalid method was published and they then showed a new method to further validate the process, that should not necessarily make their first (now retracted) paper invalid. I believe that in this instance, such a paper could have been a vlauable learning point for the scientific community, not because the method worked, but because it was true science, i.e., a step-wise evolution of methods and thus conclusions. At worst, it would be a negative result.
It is quite common for assays to be developed in parallel, so that one can be used to validate the other. It might just be that they had a pair of artifacts and they managed to resolve the problem with the second assay, after they had jumped the gun on publishing data from the first.
The publish or perish system is partly to blame, not allowing methodologies to mature before publication.
This compound can be tricky to measure precisely by LC due to the inavailability of pure commercial standards and enzymatic assays can also give artifacts. As a researcher in this field, I believe it is rife with aberrant analytical methods and I’m actually impressed that a paper was actually retracted by the author for titers later deemed to be incorrect. That’s the sad state of things.
I think that the paper should have stayed and that a correction, even if mega, to discuss its problems, would have been more suitable and would have advanced a search for change. I can also appreciate the counter-argument that states that if such papers with erroneous methods are not retracted, then it leaves open the possibilty of submitting, and publishing, erroneous science, without any consequences. This fear could be totally removed if we removed the money-for-impact factor system that is used to gamble the system, and has thus corrupted it, simply because junk science could be published, and could be corrected and commented on in PPPR, without the authors getting financial retribution for what they have published. This now brings into question who calls the shots: the authors, or the publishers? Could the author call for the retraction of their own paper simply because their copyrigh is on “lease” to the publisher? Do authors actually have more legal power than the editors and publishers but are not aware of it? This case starts to reveal some interesting aspects of publishing that are not often discussed.
I think the clue is in this passage, especially the last sentence:
“The retraction has been requested by the author due to the development of an improved method for quantitative analysis of 3-hydroxypropionic acid in the author’s laboratory, which invalidated the previously determined titer. Some experiments cannot be repeated by the first author himself nor other people in the lab.”
The fact that it “invalidated” the previous titre and that some experiments couldn’t be repeated suggests to me that the new way of quantifying the 3-hydroxypropionic acid produced by their mutants indicated that the levels produced were lower or undetectable, thus their previous paper reported incorrect results.