Elsevier has retracted two papers for image duplication – 13 years after the authors alerted the journal to issues with the work.
The papers are the third and fourth retractions for a group of researchers in Ireland. The team had asked Elsevier journals to retract five papers in April 2012 — one of which is still in process.
The first two papers, published in Cancer Letters, were retracted in 2013.
Then last week, two more articles, published in the European Journal of Pharmacology (EJP), were retracted.
Why the delay? The publisher said it only recently discovered the unfulfilled request.
“During updates to the retraction platform and tool to clear any possible backlogs, EJP staff received information about a case concerning some EJP articles in the system,” a spokesperson for Elsevier told Retraction Watch. “The authors were contacted for clarification and the publisher submitted retraction requests for the two articles.“
The authors had “concerns that they could no longer guarantee the accuracy of certain figures within the paper,” according to both EJP retraction notices, which cite image duplications among the five papers.
The remaining article, which appeared in Chemico-Biological Interactions, “has yet to be retracted,” according to the Elsevier spokesperson. “We are in touch with the current EIC [Editor in Chief] on this paper.”
All five papers discuss aspects of apoptosis in human cancer cells.
The Cancer Letters papers retracted in 2013 have a single citation each, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. One of the newly retracted papers in EJP has 65 citations, 50 of which occurred in 2013 or later, after the authors reported the image duplications. The other EJP paper has 39 citations, 23 of which were from 2013 or later. The not-yet-retracted Chemico-Biological Interactions paper has 18 citations, 12 of which occurred in 2013 or later.
“We strive to correct our records promptly whenever necessary,” the Elsevier spokesperson told us. The retraction notices both state, “the Publisher wishes to apologise to the authors for the delayed retraction.”
Denise Egan is the corresponding author on all five articles. Egan’s affiliation at the time was Institute of Technology Tallaght, now part of Technological University Dublin. We reached out to Egan on August 14, the date the second retraction became available online, and have not received a response.
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