Sometimes we come across a real head-scratcher.
That happened this week, when we saw a retraction notice for a 2015 paper on gastric cancer in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, which only says the authors “made big mistakes” and contains two fairly significant typos.
Although there’s no sign of a retraction on PubMed, the table of contents for the latest issue of the journal lists the retraction — but includes no hyperlink to the notice. The only way to see it is via a Web cached version. Here’s the text:
We want to withdraw our paper because we made big mistakes when we delt with the data in the manuscript. Thank you very much for your understanding of this withdrawl.
The 2015 paper “Correlation between expression of NF-E2-related factor 2 and progression of gastric cancer” has been cited once, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, formerly part of Thomson Reuters.
The journal is published by e-Century, which was on the now-defunct list of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory publishers compiled by Jeffrey Beall.
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