What Caught Our Attention: When a reader noticed that six panels in one figure from a 2013 paper looked a little fishy, the authors decided to take a closer look. Following an internal investigation, the authors learned that a laboratory technician had manipulated the panels after realizing some of the original data had been lost.
Journal: Molecular Medicine Reports
Authors: Na Wang, Min Li, Wen-Qiao Zang, Yun-Yun Ma, Yuan-Yuan Wang, Guo-Qiang Zhao
Affiliations: Zhengzhou University, China; Henan Medical College for Staff and Workers, China
Subsequently to the publication of this article, an interested reader drew to our attention the fact that the six panels shown in Fig. 6 shared several areas of identity among them. Following an internal investigation, a laboratory technician, who was responsible for editing the pictures, admitted that the data as presented in the figure had been manipulated after having mislaid some of the original data. The corresponding author of the article takes responsibility for this oversight, and therefore the paper is to be retracted from publication. All of the named authors agree to this retraction. We deeply regret that these errors were allowed to remain in the paper, and extend our apologies to the readership of the Journal. [the original article was published in Molecular Medicine Reports 7: 799-804, 2013; DOI: 10.3892/mmr.2013.1280]
Date of Article: January 2013
Times Cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: 1
Date of Notice: January 9, 2018
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This is the 2nd retraction from the same corresponding author, Dr. Zhao.
https://diagnosticpathology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13000-017-0657-9
the authors learned that a laboratory technician had manipulated the panels after realizing some of the original data had been lost.
In the absence of a confession directly from the technician, I think this sentence needs an “allegedly” somewhere.