Researchers in China have retracted a pair of papers in the same journal after running into “irreconcilable” differences with the articles.
Both articles appeared in Molecular Medicine Reports, from Spandidos.
One article, “Combined treatment with extracorporeal shock‑wave therapy and bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell transplantation improves bone repair in a rabbit model of bone nonunion,” published in November 2017, suffered from, well, serious nonunion:
The authors of the above article wish to retract it on account of two reasons: First, the authors have experienced irreconcilable difficulties in deciding upon the suitable order of the authors in the author list. Secondly, due to the authors’ negligence, the graph featured in Fig. 1 on p. 1328 does not match with the textual description, and the authors intend to rectify this discrepancy by performing further experiments. The authors regret any inconvenience that this retraction has caused.
The second paper, “BIRC5 is a novel target of peroxisome proliferator‑activated receptor γ in brain microvascular endothelium cells during cerebral ischemia,” appeared in December 2017. It has similar issues — an authorship spat followed by fatal errors:
The authors of the above article wish to retract their paper. Subsequently to its publication, in addition to certain irreconcilable differences in opinion shared among the authors, they have realized that, in their analysis of the role of peroxisome proliferator‑activated receptor γ in brain microvascular endothelial (bEnd.3) cells, certain of the results presented have been found to be incomplete and unrepeatable. Therefore, they wish to retract the paper in order to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The authors regret any inconvenience that this retraction will caused to the Editor of the journal, and the readership.
The two papers share two authors, Guozhi Huang and Qing Zeng, both of Zhujiang Hospital, part of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou. We emailed Huang with questions about the articles but haven’t heard back. We also asked Spandidos for comment — including how the figure-text fiasco managed to slip past peer review and the editing process — and are awaiting a response.
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