We recently wrote about a group of English scientists who asked Toxicology to de-publish their abstract from a conference proceedings issue. Turns out they were far from alone.
The journal’s December issue has at least five more such removal notices, all for the same problem.
The notices read:
This article has been removed at the request of the author.
This abstract was inadvertently published in the journal when the authors had requested that it should not.
The abstracts in question are:
- “PPARα and PPARδ nuclear receptor regulation of body weight and hepatic steatosis”
- “Development of human embryonic stem cell-derived hepatic cells for toxicology analysis”
- “Translational profiling of multiple myeloma cell lines RPMI8226 and 8226/R5 to discover novel markers of disease and drug resistance”
- “Non-catalytic mechanisms involved in glutathione S-transferase Pi mediated cytoprotection”
- “Acute depletion of the prion protein may abrogate Aβ oligomer toxicity”
We also noticed that the journal’s August 2012 issue contains a similar notice, for an abstract published in December 2011: “A polymorphism in the 5′ untranslated region of ERCC5 determines effectiveness of platinum-based chemotherapeutics.”
We attempted to reach one of the editors of the journal to confirm our hunch, but haven’t heard back yet.
From the scant information given, it would appear that the authors are entirely innocent of blame for any shortcomings in any of these abstracts, not to say that they wouldn’t submit almost the same thing later on (or not.)
This brings up a related issue: how does one know that a retracted article really is removed from the literature? Apparently it is not easy to confirm that every reference has remained free of retraction notices.
Any way to overcome this issue? A central hub of info on article status that one automatically consults when using articles? Surely in this connected age a solution can be found.
Meh. Most conferences I’ve presented at, they have a “tick here if you don’t want us to publish your abstract” box tucked away down the bottom. I can see how some hard-pressed admin could miss it.