27-year-old Nature paper earns expression of concern

Nature has issued an editorial expression of concern on a paper published 27 years ago — and nearly nine years after learning of an “irregularity” in a figure.

According to the June 18 statement, a figure in the 1998 paper showed duplicated control lanes, with one of them flipped. 

Pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis flagged the issue on PubPeer in 2016, and reported the problem to the journal at the same time, Francis told Retraction Watch. 

The 1998 paper has been cited 333 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, 32 of which were after 2016 when the image issue was first flagged. 

Corresponding author Ethel Cesarman, a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, told us she learned of the issue with the figure from the comment on PubPeer, although she did not learn about it until 2018, “when a ‘Claire Francis’ contacted my institution and collaborators, who then reached out to me.”

“We have procedures to assess the claims and for the institution to conduct an investigation, which in this case found an issue related to the use of cropped gels leading to an inadvertent image duplication on negative control lanes,” Cesarman told us. She said she contacted the journal about the paper after the conclusion of the investigation in 2021. “After reviewing the institution’s report, the journal makes their own decision regarding informing their readers.” 

A spokesperson for Weill Cornell Medicine confirmed the institute investigated the paper, and that the wording of the notice “reflects the findings of our evaluation through institutional processes.”

All the authors except one, for whom the journal could not obtain current contact information, agreed with the journal’s decision.

A spokesperson for Nature did not address our question about when they first heard about the problem with the figure.

“Given the age of the article and the fact that the authors no longer have the original raw data for the figure, we determined in consultation with the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group that issuing an Editorial Expression of Concern (EEoC) was the most appropriate course of action,” the spokesperson said. “This allows us to alert readers to interpret the results with caution while acknowledging that the concern could not be fully resolved.”

Cesarman has one previous retraction with different coauthors. Published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the 2004 paper earned a correction in 2006 and was retracted in 2021 ”due to multiple instances of splicing and the image manipulation to remove background gel artifacts” following an investigation by Weill Cornell Medicine, according to the retraction notice. Including this retraction and a correction, Cesarman has 14 papers with comments on PubPeer.

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