We don’t know if it’s the fastest retraction ever, but the speed is nonetheless notable: A journal retracted a paper 22 hours after a sleuth raised concerns about the article.
On August 9 just before noon, John Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and journal editor in Australia, reached out to two journals to notify them of image similarities he had flagged on PubPeer.
Loadsman asked the authors to clarify the “apparent identity” of a figure in a 2023 paper in Experimental Biomedical Research. The figure resembled one in a different paper by the same authors “representing different experimental conditions,” he wrote in his PubPeer comment. The second paper appeared in Wiley’s International Journal of Endocrinology in 2019.
Loadsman said Wiley responded “almost immediately” saying they would investigate the paper in IJE. Geena De Rose, a communications director for Wiley, confirmed to us the older paper is being investigated.
The editor-in-chief of EBR, Hayrettin Ozturk, responded to Loadsman 14 hours after his initial email to say he was looking into the article. Just shy of 22 hours after Loadsman’s initial message, Ozturk sent another email saying the paper had been retracted.
Ozturk confirmed to us Loadsman’s email initiated the inquiry, which “prompted a request for information from the authors.”
According to the retraction notice, the duplicated image was “an erroneous presentation due to an inadvertent mistake and technical reasons.” So the authors requested the article be withdrawn, the notice states.
The “swift and rapid decision stems solely from our journal’s extremely sensitive policies on these matters,” Ozturk told us.
The 2019 IJE paper has been cited 15 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. EBR is not indexed on the platform.
Sait Polat, coauthor on the study, is a professor and a department chair at Cukurova University in Adana, Turkey. Neither Polat nor Gulfidan Coskun, authors on the paper, responded to our request for comment. Coskun responded to Loadsman in a PubPeer comment about the now-retracted paper stating the similarity between the figures arose “from the use of the same EDS-administered animal model in two separate studies, each approved by different ethics committees.” Coskun, a researcher at Cukurova University, said she had also contacted the journal.
Gulfidan also responded to Loadsman’s comments on the IJE article, citing an “unintentional error during the preparation of the figure.”
Loadsman and Rene Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, have so far flagged 20 of Polat’s articles for image issues on PubPeer, all within the last three months.
We’ve covered fast retractions before, although on the order of days, not hours. In 2021, we covered a 19-day retraction, which sleuth Elisabeth Bik said was one of the fastest she had ever experienced. In another 2021 case we called “reassuringly brisk,” a journal retracted a paper “within weeks” of issues being raised.
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Same figures. One is zoomed. How this could be a mistake? Seems intentional piracy.