The Journal of Biochemical and Molecular Toxicology, a Wiley title, has corrected a pair of retraction notices in which “the reasons for the retraction were described inaccurately,” according to the corrections. The original notices also did not include “the authors’ disapproval of the retraction.”
The retracted articles, “The cardioprotective effects of a combination of quercetin and α-tocopherol on isoproterenol-induced myocardial infarcted rats,” and “Protective effects of caffeic acid on lactate dehydrogenase isoenzymes, electrocardiogram, adenosine triphosphatases, and hematology on isoproterenol-induced myocardial infarcted rats,” both appeared in the same journal in 2011, but in different issues. They have been cited 35 times, collectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In 2020, Elisabeth Bik posted about the papers on PubPeer, pointing out figures in the articles, which have the same corresponding author, were “unexpectedly similar” to each other. “Note that the lanes represent very different experiments,” she wrote.
The authors do not appear to have responded to Bik on PubPeer. The corresponding author, P. Stanely Mainzen Prince of Annamalai University in India, has not responded to our request for comment.
The journal published nearly identical retraction notices in September, and corrections a month later. The corrections stated:
In the previously published retraction note, the reasons for the retraction were described inaccurately, and the authors’ disapproval of the retraction was not reflected. This has now been addressed and corrected below.
The retraction has been agreed following an investigation into concerns raised by a third party, which revealed that some of the bands presented in the agarose gel electrophoresis in Figure 2 have been published in another article by one of the same authors. The gels in the two articles represent different experiments. The authors did not provide a satisfactory explanation or their original data. The editors consider the results and conclusion reported in this article unreliable. The authors disagree with the retraction.
We apologize for this error.
An anonymous user on PubPeer recorded the text of the original notice, which called the images in the offending figures Western blots. The captions of the figures described the images as depicting agarose gel electrophoresis, a step in making a Western blot.
Hari K. Bhat, the journal’s editor in chief, referred our questions to Wiley staffers. We received the following response from a spokesperson for the publisher:
We regret that we made an error in the retraction statement when referencing a gel electrophoresis, which we quickly corrected. As is our standard procedure, we provided the authors with advanced notice of the retraction statement, but did not receive a response until after the retraction was published.
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