Retraction count for gynecologic cancer researcher Takai grows to seven

cancerlettersNoriyuki Takai, a gynecologic cancer researcher at Oita University in Japan who retracted three papers last October, has four more retractions, these in Cancer Letters.

All but one of the notices reads as follows:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors. Errors were identified in the original data which have affected several figure panels in the article.

Those three papers are:

The fourth notice, for “Novel target genes responsive to the anti-growth activity of triptolide in endometrial and ovarian cancer cells” (cited 8 times), suggests there’s far more to the story:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor in Chief has serious doubts about the handling and publication of data associated with the four panels represented in Figure 4.

We’ve contacted Takai and the editor of the journal for more details, and will update with anything we learn.

Update, 1:40 p.m. Eastern, 3/4/13: The journal tells us:

Errors were identified in the figure panels in the four retracted papers by an anonymous reader of Cancer Letters. The Editor pursued the allegations with the corresponding author who acknowledged that the figure panels did not accurately report the original data. The corresponding author also advised that the other authors were not involved in making the figures. The corresponding author agreed to three papers being retracted. The Editor decided to retract the fourth paper as well. All authors were made aware of the decision to retract.

11 thoughts on “Retraction count for gynecologic cancer researcher Takai grows to seven”

  1. I can only say, WTF? The cited figure 4 is, of course, Western blots, but I don’t see any obvious flaws, and the protein blotting data is shown to validate mRNA data obtained by array analysis. Is the array data wrong too? Or were the blots faked to match the array data? Or maybe the original blots just couldn’t be found after 3 years? Mysterious yes, but thoroughly uninformative.

    Reply

      1. They had hundreds of genes from an array, if you can’t prove one by Western, why fake up the blot? Now the whole paper is gone.

        By the way, do these kinds of retracted studies ever get re-published, possibly with new authors re-doing the questionable experiments?

        Reply

        1. Cancer Letters usually does not publish papers with limited data. They don’t even send some papers out for review. Very unique editorial board as well.I wonder how these papers have escaped.

          Reply

  2. Anticancer Res. 2006 Mar-Apr;26(2A):939-45
    Anticancer activity of MS-275, a novel histone deacetylase inhibitor, against human endometrial cancer cells.
    Takai N, Ueda T, Nishida M, Nasu K, Narahara H
    Source
    Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Oita University Faculty of Medicine, Oita, Japan.

    http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/26/2A/939.long

    Please look at figures 2B and 2C. I believe that figures 2B and 2C show results for different cell lines.

    Reply

    1. Anticancer Activity of MS-275, a Novel Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor, against Human Endometrial Cancer Cells
      NORIYUKI TAKAI, TAMI UEDA, MASAKAZU NISHIDA, KAEI NASU and HISASHI NARAHARA
      Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Oita University Faculty of Medicine, Oita, Japan
      ANTICANCER RESEARCH 26: 939-946 (2006)
      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16619490
      http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/35/4/2478

      Absolutely no reason given, simply: “is retracted by the Authors”

      The journal (AR) and publisher (Highwire Press) are not COPE members:
      http://publicationethics.org/members
      About the journal:
      http://www.iiar-anticancer.org/
      © Copyright 2014, Dr. J.G. Delinasios
      http://www.iiar-anticancer.org/main.php?id=2
      http://ar.iiarjournals.org/ (Highwire Press)
      Highwire Press appears to be published by Stanford University:
      http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl

      Reply

    1. Why do the three last PubPeer entries, all with comments made by Peer 1, not have any date? This is very odd. The date of the comment is extremely important because it is a historic part of a paper, especially in these cases where the same reseaercher is being questioned.

      Reply

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