Florida group loses second hypertension paper, but retraction notice stays mum on why

We’ve obviously gotten plenty of mileage out of our conversation last January with L. Henry Edmunds, the grumpypants editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery who told us that the reason behind an opaque retraction notice in his journal was “none of  [our] damn business.”

Still makes us chuckle.

That episode came to mind recently when we learned of a new retraction, this one in the journal Perfusion, involving the same lead researcher, anesthesiologist Felipe Urdaneta, whose work Edmunds had pulled.Whereas Edmunds gave us an irrelevant earful, at least the retraction notice in his journal at least said something: Urdaneta’s institution, the University of Florida, had

uncovered instances of repetitious, tabulated data from previously published studies.

The new notice, however, says shockingly little:

The article ‘Treating pulmonary hypertension post cardiopulmonary bypass in pigs: milrinone vs. sildenafil analog’ by FUrdaneta, EB Lobato, T Beaver, JD Muehlschlegel, DS Kirby, C Klodell and A Sidi published in Perfusion 2008 23: 117-125, 10.1177/0267659108094739 has been retracted.

Really? That’s it? Not even a cryptic not to “repetitious, tabulated data” from other papers? We’d almost rather be berated by an ornery editor than have to deal with this sort of non-notice.

The paper has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

As we’ve written before, and before, unhelpful retraction notices help, well, no one. Not readers, not researchers, not journals — who, despite whatever their defense mechanisms might tell them, only erode their good will and legitimacy by taking the comfortable route of denial.

When we reached Urdaneta about the initial retraction, he told us the reused data stemmed from a mistake and that the duplication “was not plagiarism.” He also told us that the University of Florida had “exonerated” him in its investigation.