A cardiology journal has retracted a paper after the authors were unable to provide correct pathology slides to replace the wrong ones submitted with the original manuscript.
The paper is titled “Aortic Valve Endocarditis and Coronary Angiography With Cerebral Embolic Protection,” published on April 10, 2017 in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions (JACC:CI). It has not yet been cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
JACC:CI retracted the paper on Aug. 14, providing this notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief, as well as the authors. The article was published with pathology slides submitted by the authors. After publication, the authors notified the journal that the wrong pathology slides were submitted to the article in error. In the process, the correct slides were no longer available and therefore the authors and the Editor required a retraction of the article.
The journal received the manuscript on Dec. 28, 2016. Why the slides were unavailable so soon after the paper was submitted and published is not clear. First author Joost Daemen, a cardiologist at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, told Retraction Watch that the retraction had “Nothing to do with losing original figures,” but declined clarify why the slides weren’t available:
We have extensively discussed the rationale for the withdrawal of our manuscript with the editorial office …
We do not want to elaborate on this any further. For further questions please contact the journal.
JACC:CI has not responded to our request for comment. We’ve also reached out to Erasmus Medical Center to see if it has any guidelines on how long slides should be made available. We will update this post if more information comes in.
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College of American Pathologists standards require retention of slides and blocks for ten years, assuming that these were clinical specimens.
As a pathologist, this retraction is very confusing because they appear to be using “slides” and “figure images” interchangeably.
Slides are the physical glass or plastic material on which a tissue section is attached for microscopic examination. I have never heard of slides being submitted to a journal with a manuscript.
The retraction seem to mean that the pictures in the manuscript figures included images from the wrong glass/plastic slides. When the authors discovered the error, they no longer had access to the glass/plastic slides that they intended to photograph, and therefore could not generate new pictures and new figures.