Publisher updates with more info on staph retraction

We brought you this story last week, about a paper on drug resistant staph being retracted for a lab error. Now, we’ve got an update from Rachel Safer, senior editor for medical journals at Oxford University Press, where the paper was published.

Apparently, the researchers “inadvertently relied upon the use of a test system that was not approved for the microorganism studied in their paper,” leading to the retraction, and the corresponding author of the study wasn’t initially all that responsive:

The Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID) Editorial Office received a Brief Report from a team at the University of Pittsburgh on October 23, 2013. Entitled “Common Occurrence of Ceftriaxone-Resistant, Methicillin-Sensitive Staphylococcus aureus at a Community Teaching Hospital,” the manuscript was peer reviewed and accepted for publication on March 1, 2014. It published online as an Uncorrected Proof on March 14 (seehttp://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/03/14/cid.ciu149.full.pdf+html) and as a Corrected Proof on April 2 (seehttp://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/04/02/cid.ciu149.full.pdf+html).

On April 7, the CID Editorial Office received a “Letter to the Editor” from a team at the University of Iowa that questioned the findings of the paper. The letter was sent to the corresponding author asking for a substantive response. Having not heard back, CID’s Editor-in-Chief connected with a senior author on the paper on May 8. Based on the feedback from the Iowa team, the authors agreed that the findings of the paper inadvertently relied upon the use of a test system that was not approved for the microorganism studied in their paper. The authors agreed with the Editorial Office that the paper should, therefore, be retracted. The retraction notice published online on May 14 (seehttp://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/14/cid.ciu149.full.pdf+html) and then as part of CID’s September 1 issue (seehttp://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/59/5.toc).