“The retraction that took years” is a common enough refrain on Retraction Watch that it might as be its own genre. Here’s one that didn’t.
A journal wasted no time pouncing on a suspect paper, retracting the 2016 article just three days after a commenter flagged concerns about the images in the work on PubPeer.
As the commenter, Actinopolyspora biskrensis, wrote:
Potentially supporting the concern that this paper may have been outsourced to a third party, one image in Figure 4B seems to overlap with an image Figure 4B of another paper: Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy (2018), doi: 10.1016/j.biopha.2017.12.114, discussed here: https://pubpeer.com/publications/29A07BD9E3F27454B5AF867A937210. The Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy paper seems to share data with two other papers too. Hmm.
On March 1, Twitter user “Cheshire” mentioned the PubPeer post and looped in Heather Malloy, the senior manager of peer review operations at Mary Ann Liebert, which publishes the journal.
Malloy responded immediately:
Thank you for the heads up. We’re on it.
And they were. According to the retraction notice, dated March 4:
The Editor-in-Chief of DNA and Cell Biology officially retracts the article entitled, “H19 Functions as a ceRNA in Promoting Metastasis Through Decreasing miR-200s Activity in Osteosarcoma,” by Min Li, Hanwen Chen, Yuejiang Zhao, Shuming Gao, and Cai Cheng (DNA Cell Biol 35(5):235–240; doi: 10.1089/dna.2015.3171) after receiving alerts from the PubPeer platform 1 and comments on Twitter 2 regarding multiple image duplications between Figure 1A-E and Figure 4A-B, and also with a separately published manuscript from a different author group (Figure 4B). 3
The journal publisher independently confirmed the suspected duplications.
The corresponding author of the paper, Dr. Min Li, along with all co-authors, were contacted for an explanation but no response was received.
DNA and Cell Biology is committed to upholding the rigors of scientific publishing and the veracity of the literature.
The paper has been cited 35 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Malloy told us:
This was also a matter [of] good timing: I saw the alert right when I was in the middle of evaluating several other papers that have been in limbo too long for my comfort, and so I added it to my queue.
I am now routinely scanning figures when we do get alerted to potential issues, and was quickly able to independently confirm multiple figure issues/ duplications and contact the authors for an explanation.
We received no response by our stated deadline.
There was nothing ambiguous about the issue, in my opinion, and they were extensive enough to require retraction.
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[This comment was retracted prior to being published]
“There was nothing ambiguous about the issue, in my opinion.“ We’ll have to trust her with that one as the retracted article is pay per view.
3 days though? Deadline must have been 2 or less. What if it was a innocent mistake? Two or 3 days isn’t a lot of time to respond. Just thinking though of the time I mistakenly uploaded a wrong figure file to a journal in my haste to get a revision in on time. Easy enough to do, a lot of plots look similar, file names not ideal, hard to inspect on the manuscript management website. Good thing I was lucky it wasn’t a dupe. Maybe give 5 days next time (although in this case, once their goose was cooked,doesn’t sound like there was much they could say.
Way to go MaryAnne Liebert!
If you visit the PubPeer link in the article above, you’ll see the figure that I annotated identifying **6** overlapping figures plus another paper in which an image from this paper also appeared… and that paper had overlaps with 2 other papers. This is clearly a papermill product.
Yes I see, no question that the authors wouldn’t be able to ‘splain there way out of that one given all the time in the world. I continue to be astonished how you and other famous pattern recognizers find these. Sure, once they’re called out in neat colored rectangles it obvious that they could not have occurred by chance. But to find these in the first place, across articles or journals blows me away. Kudos to all you eagle eyed sleuths.
Well, the other side of that overlap (“Retinoid interferon-induced mortality19 (GRIM19) inhibits proliferation and invasion in rheumatoid arthritis fibroblast-like synoviocytes“) was a papermill product. More specifically, an in-house papermill that provided publications to staff at hospitals attached to Jilin University.
But the other paper came two years after the present one, and there is nothing else to link them. It is possible that the papermillers simply pirated the figure. It saddens me to report that not everyone is scrupulous in the papermill industry.
Thanks for posting the note. Nice to see prompt action.
https://twitter.com/Thatsregrettab1/status/1501300250266374146?s=20&t=trbCwzSZe2UgSqYcgT7o_Q Here’s a more common response from a journal on an obvious (to me anyway) series of manipulated images.
That response is truly disheartening, especially coming from an editor of what I assume to be a good journal from I thought to be a well-known publisher. But that their reply was, ” … a more common response …”? Please, please, please tell me that you are exaggerating.