Anil Potti‘s retraction count is now eight with the withdrawal of a 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Here’s the notice, which appeared online in JAMA sometime yesterday: Continue reading Potti and colleagues retract 2008 JAMA paper
What do you do when it turns out the materials you used in your successful experiment weren’t actually the materials you thought they were?
If you’re Peter Zammit, of King’s College London, and colleagues, you retract a 2008 paper in the Journal of Cell Science. Here’s the notice, for “B-catenin promotes self-renewal of skeletal-muscle satellite cells:” Continue reading Authors retract Journal of Cell Science study after realizing they were using the wrong gene constructs
The journal Cancer has issued an Expression of Concern about two lung cancer screening papers long dogged by doubt.
Last April, The Cancer Letter and The New York Times jointly published an investigation into the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program (I-ELCAP) run by Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz. Other researchers had already criticized the design and conclusions of that trial, but as the investigation noted, an October 2008 review of the study found that the researchers couldn’t find 90 percent of the subjects’ consent forms, an ethical no-no that jeopardizes as many as 135 papers.
Two papers published in Cancer, in 2000 and 2001, are among those studies, according to the notice (links added), which credits the Times and The Cancer Letter and notes that the journal has referred the case to Federal investigators: Continue reading Cancer issues expression of concern about two Henschke I-ELCAP lung cancer screening papers
The authors of a study in Urology that was at the center of two 2009 lawsuits brought by a company that funded the work have retracted the paper.
The idea behind the research — by Robert Getzenberg and colleagues at Johns Hopkins — was to find an alternative to the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, which many urologists recommend, but which many groups — including the US Preventive Services Task Force — find wanting. The work gave rise to a company, Onconome, Science reported in a 2009 story about the lawsuits: Continue reading Hopkins scientists retract prostate cancer screening study at center of 2009 lawsuits
If Retraction Watch was actually a business, as opposed — for the moment, anyway — to a labor of love for two guys with day jobs, 2011 would have been a very good year for business.
It was a year that will probably see close to 400 retractions, including a number of high-profile ones, once the dust settles. Those high numbers caught the attention of a lot of major media outlets, from Nature to NPR to the Wall Street Journal. Science publications, including LiveScience and The Scientist, have done their own end-of-year retraction lists.
It was also a good year for us at Retraction Watch. Many news outlets featured us in their coverage, either picking up stories we’d broken or asking us for comment on big-picture issues. Three national NPR programs — Science Friday, On the Media, and All Things Considered — had us on air. We launched a column in LabTimes, and Nature asked us to write a year-end commentary. We even earned a Wikipedia entry. Continue reading The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” keeps U.S. mail carriers from delivering your letters and packages, and neither seven retractions, nor being forced to resign, nor malpractice settlements (and an ongoing case) keeps former Duke oncologist Anil Potti from publishing papers.
Potti’s latest effort, “A Pathway-Based Approach to Identify Molecular Biomarkers in Cancer,” appeared last month in the Annals of Surgical Oncology. The subject of the review is the same as many of his now-retracted papers, none of which are cited by the new paper. Continue reading Seven retractions, a resignation, and lawsuit settlements haven’t stopped Anil Potti from publishing
Just days after the retraction of a paper in Science that had claimed a link between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and the virus XMRV, the authors of a similar paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have retracted theirs.
The PNAS paper, “Detection of MLV-related virus gene sequences in blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy blood donors,” was published online on August 23, 2010 by Shyh-Ching Lo, Harvey Alter, and colleagues. Here’s the notice, which PNAS says will be available on its site sometime this week: Continue reading Another shoe drops as authors retract PNAS chronic fatigue syndrome-virus paper
The editors of Science have fully retracted a study they published in 2009 alleging a link between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and the virus XMRV.
The notice begins with a nod to the reasons that the paper has already been partially retracted:
Science is fully retracting the Report “Detection of an infectious retrovirus, XMRV, in blood cells of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome” (1). Multiple laboratories, including those of the original authors (2), have failed to reliably detect xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus (XMRV) or other murine leukemia virus (MLV)–related viruses in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients. In addition, there is evidence of poor quality control in a number of specific experiments in the Report. Fig. 1, table S1, and fig. S2 have been retracted by the authors (3).
It also refers to evidence of image manipulation that was described by blogger Abbie Smith and then reported in the Chicago Tribune:
Continue reading Chronic fatigue syndrome-XMRV paper retracted by Science, completely this time
If there’s one consistent lesson of covering retractions, it’s that science doesn’t stop when researchers publish a paper. But what also seems true is that once a paper is published, lots of people — authors and editors, in particular — are often reluctant to say just what’s happened next, particularly if it casts the study or the journal in a negative light.
Some of this is understandable, given the weight given papers by tenure committees and granting agencies. Still, Retraction Watch readers will not be surprised to know we’d like that to change, so when Nature asked us to contribute an end-of-the-year commentary, we decided to focus on post-publication peer review. In our piece, which appears this week, titled “The paper is not sacred,” we argue: Continue reading Stop fetishizing the scientific paper: Our invited Comment in Nature
By now, Retraction Watch readers are familiar with papers that are withdrawn because of faked data. Those cases may involve pressure cooker environments, bad seeds, or both, but they’re usually intentional. But what if a researcher fabricated findings without even knowing it?
That’s the idea behind a provocative paper just published online in Science and Engineering Ethics. In it, Matan Shelomi, a graduate student in entomology at the University of California, Davis, describes the case of Jay Traver, an entomologist who, in 1951, published a description of her experiences with “a mite infestation of her scalp that resisted all treatment and was undetectable to anyone other than herself” in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington (PESW). As Shelomi notes: Continue reading Retraction by reason of insanity? A look at a 60-year-old entomology paper