Kidney International is in the process of retracting a stem cell paper containing plagiarized images, Retraction Watch has learned.
Here’s the notice that will appear for “Human renal stem/progenitor cells repair tubular epithelial cell injury through TLR2-driven inhibin-A and microvesicle-shuttled decorin“:
At the request of all authors, and in agreement with the editors, the paper, “Human renal stem/progenitor cells repair tubular epithelial cell injury through TLR2-driven inhibin-A and microvesicle-shuttled decorin” by Fabio Sallustio, Vincenzo Costantino, Sharon N. Cox, Antonia Loverre, Chiara Divella, Marco Rizzi and Francesco P. Schena. Kidney International (2013) 83, 392-403; doi:10.1038/ki.2012.413, is being retracted. The reason for the retraction is that figure 1 of the manuscript contained unacknowledged and unauthorized modified versions of images that had been previously published by F. Sallustio et al. 2010, FASEB Journal doi: 10.1096/fj.09-13648 and also again in PloS One Sallustio et al. 2013, PLOS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068296, some of which were mislabeled.
The paper has been cited 24 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Executive managing editor Pat Morrissey told us the retraction would probably be in the February 2015 issue. In response to further questions, she emailed us:
Thank you for your email. We do not generally comment on retractions. With regards to your request for further information, we would refer you to the authors’ retraction notice which you link to and suggest that you contact the authors with any specific questions that you may have.
We assume she meant the text of the message that we sent her, since the retraction hasn’t been published yet, but we did take her up on the offer to reach out to the authors. We’ll update with anything we learn.
In the meantime, we hope this post shows up in searches for the paper in case anyone is planning to cite it before February.
“Plagiarized images”? Self-plagiarized, if anything, the original images were from the same first author’s own papers.
At least the re-use of data led to a retraction, rather than the usual correction/mega correction where re-used data are replaced with other data.