Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record.
Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.”
Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) by a group of authors in India.
The article, “System Wide Analysis Unravels Differential Regulation and In Vivo Essentiality of VapBC TA Systems From Mycobacterium tuberculosis,” came from the lab of Ramandeep Singh, of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, in Faridabad.
Almost two years after publication, in December 2019, the journal issued a correction for the article stating that one of the figures in the paper (Figure 2):
included an overlooked error in the morphology images for pTetR-VapC34. The corrected figure is reproduced here.
The authors regret the error.
Turns out, the new figure was a cut-paste job from a 2016 article in Scientific Reports by Singh and colleagues — which itself has been corrected for image problems.
Commenters on PubPeer picked up on the attempt at deception, and brought receipts. As it happens, the 2016 article in Scientific Reports appears to have been the source for images in at least two other publications by Singh’s group, one of which has a correction for “a mistake” in a figure and the other of which has been retracted from the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
According to that retraction notice:
The article has been withdrawn by the authors. Issues related to WT panels were identified. The image from the WT biofilm formation panel published in Agarwal, S., et al. (2018) J. Infect. Dis. 217, 1809–1820 was inadvertently reused in Fig. 3C of the article. The images from 8-week WT-infected guinea pigs published in Arora, G., et al. (2018) Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol. 8, 385 and Singh, M., et al. (2016) Sci. Rep. 6, 26900 were inadvertently reused in Fig. 5, C and D, of the article. The error happened as experimental data shown in each of the articles were derived from the same experiment in which the growth patterns of multiple mutant strains were compared with the parental WT strain in vitro and in vivo. The authors apologize to the readers and scientific community for these errors and intend to republish these results with necessary corrections and additional data. The authors reaffirm the experimental data and state that these inadvertent mistakes do not affect the results or conclusions of the work.
Singh’s group also has a correction, for image issues, for a 2015 paper in Nature Communications.
So, confronted with this pattern of bad behavior, the editors of JID did what they had to do and retracted the 2018 article.
No, of course they didn’t.
Instead, the journal has issued an expression of concern about the paper:
We have learned that one figure panel in the corrigendum was duplicated and manipulated from a 2016 Scientific Reports article (Singh et al. Establishing virulence associated polyphosphate kinase 2 as a drug target for Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Sci Rep 2016; 6:26900). We are publishing this Editorial Expression of Concern to alert our readers to this apparent breach of scientific ethics and are working with the authors and institutional officials on a satisfactory resolution of this issue.
Martin Hirsch, the editor-in-chief of JID, told us that the journal has given the researchers a hard deadline to explain the problems — a date that’s not exactly right around the corner:
We have been in discussion with the authors and their institutional authorities who are conducting an internal investigation. We have informed them both that unless the results of the investigation provide exculpatory information, we plan to retract the article on Oct 1, 2021 or shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, the paper has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Ramandeep Singh did not respond to a request for comment.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].