A group of researchers from Shangdong, China, has retracted their 2011 paper in the Journal of Molecular Medicine on the heart-protective properties of a substance in ginseng because the article contained dodgy figures.
The article, “Ginsenoside-Rg1 enhances angiogenesis and ameliorates ventricular remodeling in a rat model of myocardial infarction,” purported to show that ginsenoside: Continue reading Image problems lead to demise of paper on ginseng for heart attack
Last November we wrote about the case of Alejandra Bravo and Mario Soberón, a wife-husband team of microbiologists studying genetically modified crops, who had been disciplined by the National Autonomous University of Mexico for having manipulated images in 11 papers.
The tinkering did not rise to the level of fraud, according to the university — which perhaps helps explain why it didn’t lead to requests for retractions, according to Soberón. Instead, he said at the time, at least seven journals would be issuing corrections. We now have what appears to be the first of these, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Continue reading Hefty correction in JBC for GMO researchers in image tampering case
Joseph Hoffman, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Bielefeld in Germany says he got a “kind of odd” feeling as he read a recent paper on the transcriptome of the spotted seal. Let’s just call it deja vu.
The article, “Characterization of the spotted seal Phoca largha transcriptome using Illumina paired-end sequencing and development of SSR markers,” which appeared in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part D: Genomics and Proteomics:
Continue reading Seals of disapproval, as pinniped paper gets yanked for plagiarism
The Surgeon has retracted a 2012 article by a group from the U.K. who took text from a previously published article. So, you say? Nu?
Well, we found — through relatively little effort — that the plagiarizees were themselves, shall we say, liberal in their use of material from other sources.
The retracted article was titled “Bone graft substitutes: What are the options?,” and it appeared in August 2012. One of the options, we guess, was to steal text.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Post 982 — in which we find plagiarized bone graft paper that grafted from other papers
Pharmaceutical Biology has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of liver researchers from China after the discovery of an error that evidently invalidated the results in the paper.
The article, “Antifibrotic effects of protocatechuic aldehyde on experimental liver fibrosis,” purported to show that
protocatechuic aldehyde, the major degradation of phenolic acids … has potentially conferring antifibrogenic effects.
Last October, Anica Klockars, a neuroscience researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a colleague published a controversial comment in the journal Small GTPases, a Landes Bioscience title.
The title of the letter was meant to provoke: “Scientific yellow journalism.”
As the authors wrote: Continue reading Charge of “scientific yellow journalism” has supervisor seeing red, leads to retraction
A group of cancer researchers in Argentina has retracted a paper on the p300 protein in breast cancer that appeared in Experimental and Molecular Pathology.
The article, titled “Intracellular distribution of p300 and its differential recruitment to aggresomes in breast cancer,” was published in 2010 by Maria E. Fermento and colleagues. It has been cited 11 times since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading The “unintentionality” of being leads to nothingness for paper on protein’s role in cancer
We have poked fun at Pattern Recognition Letters before for failing to catch blatant plagiarism. We probably should have held off on those jokes for this post.
A group of IT researchers from India has suffered the retraction of a paper in PRL for heavily basing the piece on at least four previous papers written by one of the co-authors without proper attribution (not that such attribution likely would have absolved the sin).
The paper, titled “A robust kernelized intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm in segmentation of noisy medical images,” was published in January of this year by Prabhjot Kaur and colleagues.
Here’s the retraction notice:
Continue reading “Considerable overlap” leads to retraction of medical imaging paper
Blood has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Swedish authors, one of whom appears to have misappropriated data from his mentor.
The article, titled “Microparticles are the basic storage units for different proteins in platelet granules,” appeared online in July 2012 and was written by Chi Zhang and Yang Yang, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
But as the retraction notice explains, there was a problem:
The journal Inorganica Chimica Acta has retracted a paper it published earlier this year over an authorship dispute involving the lead researcher and his colleagues in France.
The title of the paper — whose bulk alone gave us a headache — was “Reaction of a bidentate ligands (4,4′-dimethyl 2,2′-bipyridine) with planar-chiral chloro-bridged ruthenium: Synthesis of cis-dicarbonyl[4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-bipyridine- κO1,κO2]{2-[tricarbonyl(η6-phenylene- κC1)chromium]pyridine-κN}ruthenium hexafluorophosphate” — and it purportedly came from a lab in Beirut.
However, as the retraction notice indicates, that’s not quite so:
Continue reading Paper — with longest title ever? — retracted for lack of author approval