The corresponding author of a paper flagged on PubPeer for an apparently duplicated image will be asking the journal to publish a correction, Retraction Watch has learned.
The paper, “The BET bromodomain inhibitor exerts the most potent synergistic anticancer effects with quinone-containing compounds and anti-microtubule drugs,” appeared in Oncotarget in 2016. Its authors include Marcel Dinger, now a dean at the University of Sydney, who has said he’s working to correct review papers that cited papermill articles, and sleuth Jennifer A. Byrne, also of the University of Sydney.
Earlier this month, an anonymous user on PubPeer pointed out areas of images in figure 6B that were “much more similar than expected.”
We reached out to Tao Liu, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and the corresponding author of the article, who told us:
My collaborator accidently made a mistake when assembling Figure 6B, and provided me the wrong graph in 2015. We will contact the journal to publish an erratum.
Byrne told us she could see the partial duplication the PubPeer comment flagged, and “based on my understanding of the data shown, I agree that there should not be any duplication between these 2 images.”
She added:
By way of background, I was a co-author on this publication as I was a co-investigator on one of the competitively-awarded grants that supported this project, from 2013-2015. This grant was intended to promote collaborative translational research across two research sites in Sydney, Australia, where I was the co-investigator representing the second research site. None of the experiments for this project, including those described in this publication, were performed in my laboratory. I reviewed the manuscript prior to submission but I did not detect the image duplication.
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The penultimate author, Professor Xu Dong Zhang, University of Newcastle, Australia, has several papers commented on at Pubpeer with. Professor Peter Hersey, who is now at the University of Sydney.
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Zhang+Hersey
This is a correction and nothing to do with retraction or RW.
Retraction or things leading to retractions.
Please study the Pubpeer list in comment#1.
Not every post on Retraction Watch is about a retraction. I don’t think that is a rule.
I find this quote a bit odd.
“My collaborator accidently made a mistake when assembling Figure 6B, and provided me the wrong graph in 2015. We will contact the journal to publish an erratum.”
The problematic data is not a graph. Does the corresponding author know the difference between a graph and a photo?
That caught my eye also, but are these images not “micrographs” or “photomicrographs?” You would know the terminology better than I, but I thought this might be a different way to phrase that term.