The Indian Journal of Surgery, a Springer-Verlag title, has retracted a 2011 paper with a title only the Marquis de Sade would love: “Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings.”
We know what you’re saying: Who knew penises could be strangulated? Well, it’s true.
Continue reading Come again? “Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings” retracted for duplication
A fraud investigation at a New York state research institution has led to two retractions of papers looking at genetic links to autism.
The 2011 papers, which appeared in Genes, Brain and Behavior, involve work conducted at the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities’ (OPWDD’s) Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, on Staten Island. The last author on both articles is Xiaohong Li, head of the institute’s cellular neurobiology laboratory.
Here’s what the retraction notice has to say: Continue reading Autism genetics papers retracted after fraud inquiry at NY research agency
The journal Higher Education Policy has retracted an article it published last year by a scholar in Ethiopia whose grasp of publishing policy seems pretty shaky.
The article, “Financing Higher Education in Ethiopia: Analysis of Cost-Sharing Policy and its Implementation,” which appeared online in August 2012, was by Sewale Abate Ayalew, of Bahir Dar University College of Business and Economics.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Cost-sharing paper that shared too much with other works earns retraction
Here’s a good example of a retraction done the right way (we think).
The Journal of the American Chemical Society has retracted — at the behest of the principal investigator — a 2008 article by a group of researchers whose subsequent studies undermined their confidence in the validity of their initial findings.
The article was titled “Cooperative melting in caged dimers of rigid small molecule DNA-hybrids,” and it came from the lab of SonBinh Nguyen, of Northwestern University. As the paper’s abstract stated:
Continue reading We know why the caged dimers sing: They’re being retracted
Yesterday we reported on the retraction for data misuse and plagiarism of a 21-year-old paper on sex and female cancer patients. Turns out we missed a couple of rather interesting details about the authors of the pulled article.
One tidbit, for example, is that one of them, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, is science royalty, having been a member of a team that won the 2000 Ig Nobel prize in medicine. Their heralded study, “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal,” published in 1999 in the BMJ: An inside-the-MRI look at the human body having sex. Continue reading Authors of retracted sex paper won Ig Nobel for MRI study of coitus — and had another retraction
Leukemia & Lymphoma has retracted 2004 paper by a group of authors in Mexico after concluding that, well, the article never should have been accepted to begin with.
The article, “Adjuvant radiotherapy in stage IV diffuse large cell lymphoma improves outcome,” came from oncologists at the National Medical Center. Its abstract (still available on Medline) states: Continue reading Lacking “scientific and analytical rigor,” 8-year-old lymphoma paper falls to retraction
Here’s one for the way-back machine.
The Annual Review of Sex Research (which is a supplement to the Journal of Sex Research) has retracted a 1992 paper by a group of researchers who lifted much of their analysis from two even older articles by another scholar. At 21 years post-publication, this is one of the oldest — but not the record-oldest — retractions we’ve covered to date.
The pulled paper, “Sexuality and cancer in women,” came from Willibrord C. M. Weijmar Schultz, Harry B. M. Van de Wiel, Daniela E. E. Hahn, and Mels F. Van Driel. (Weijmar Schultz and Van de Wiel are co-authors of this rather curious passage about the appropriateness of sexual contact between doctors and patients:
Continue reading 21-year-old article on the sex lives of women with cancer retracted for data misuse
An article published in the Bulletin of the Italian Society of Entomology has been retracted in the wake of a squabble over the ownership of the data.
The 2012 paper, “A contribution to the Ichneumoninae fauna of Sicily (Hymenoptera Ichneumonidae,” was written by Matthias Riedel and Salvatore Tomarchio, and deals with the so-called ichneumon wasps (or flies), a family with some 60,000 member species worldwide and one that, as this Wikipedia entry notes, caught the particular attention of Charles Darwin: Continue reading Dispute over data forces retraction of wasp paper
Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences is retracting a 2012 paper on a “model approach” to e-learning that well, was anything but a model approach to scientific publishing.
The article, “Implications of E-learning systems and self-efficiency on students outcomes: a model approach,” was written by Tanzila Saba, who has been affiliated with institutions in Malaysia and Pakistan.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading See one, do one, copy one? E-learning paper retracted for plagiarism
What are the chances of successfully duplicating publication in the Journal of Theoretical Probability? Not too high, it seems.
A pair of South Korean authors have gotten a five-year ban from the journal for double-publishing a paper in the math literature.
The article, “Convergence of Weighted Sums for Arrays of Negatively Dependent Random Variables and Its Applications,” was written by Jong-Il Baek and Sung-Tae Park of Wonkwang University in IkSan.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Double submission leads to retraction of probability paper — and a publishing ban