Case Reports in Dentistry has pulled a 2014 article about an oral parasitic infection (caution: not pretty) after learning that the authors were not exactly honest about their work.
Here’s the abstract of the paper, “Rhinosporidiosis of the Parotid Duct”:
Rhinosporidiosis is a benign chronic granulomatous infection caused by Rhinosporidiosis seeberi (R. seeberi). Rhinosporidiosis is endemic in South Asia, notably in Southern India and Sri Lanka. The common sites of involvement are the nose and nasopharynx followed by ocular tissue. Rhinosporidiosis is also known to involve many rare sites and may become disseminated to ocular in generalized form. Rhinosporidiosis of parotid duct is extremely rare. The case presented here is of 18-year-old male from the nonendemic zone of Nepal with a proliferative mass in the parotid duct. Although rhinosporidiosis was not taken into consideration in the clinical differential diagnosis, eventual histopathological diagnosis confirmed rhinosporidiosis. Thus clinicians should be flexible in the differential diagnosis of proliferative growth in the parotid duct, even in those cases which are from nonendemic areas.
But as the retraction notice explains, there were problems.
The paper entitled “Rhinosporidiosis of the Parotid Duct” [1], published in Case Reports in Dentistry, has been retracted as it was submitted without the knowledge or consent of Dr. Premalatha Shetty who was responsible for the patient whose case was presented in the manuscript. Also, the manuscript includes false data, as the presented case was originally reported and treated in a hospital at Mangalore, India, in 2009 and not in Nepal.
Lends new meaning to “false teeth”.