Sometimes, the path to correcting the scientific record takes a few turns. In the case of a paper about a new cancer compound, authorship issues led to a correction and, ultimately, a retraction — along with a double-back to retract the earlier correction.
We reported on the first part of the story back in January: A 2011 paper that described a novel compound that could work as a drug for the side effects of chemotherapy was corrected in 2012 to add additional authors. But once the authors realized their supposedly novel compound had actually been synthesized by another author, they decided to retract the paper from Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry earlier this year, concluding “these facts made the paper inappropriate and unfaithful.”
Apparently, around the same time, the authors decided to retract the earlier correction, as well:
This corrigendum has been retracted at the request of the authors because the original article (Bioorg. Med. Chem. 19, 2011, 5175–5182) has been retracted.
We just discovered this retracted correction, which appears to have been posted late last year.
Here’s the original corrigendum for “3-Benzhydryl-4-piperidones as novel neurokinin-1 receptor antagonists and their efficient synthesis“:
The names of Masayoshi Yamaoka and Eikoh Imamiya were inadvertently omitted from the author line. The correct author line appears above.
It’s not often we see retractions of corrections, so we’ve emailed the journal and the authors to find out more information.
Although rare, this isn’t the first correction that’s been felled by larger issues with the paper itself. For example, here’s a case involving an International Journal of Modern Physics B paper. It was submitted without the knowledge of the co-authors (hence the correction)…and then it was discovered that the authors had also manipulated data (hence the retraction of both the article and correction).
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