An investigation at Taipei Medical University found that an author made “serious mistakes” when preparing a manuscript.
The journal prompted the university to investigate the paper, which looks at the role of a protein in repairing arteries after an injury.
The retraction notice explains:
Continue reading Author “committed serious mistakes,” finds Taipei investigation
An author has begun the process of taking legal action against a publisher for retracting his paper.
As we reported last month, John Bishop, the CEO of an independent media company called Crocels, based in Pontypridd, Wales, argues that by taking down his paper, De Gruyter defamed him and breached a contract — their agreement to publish his paper. Now, Bishop has sent the publisher what’s known in the UK as a “letter of claim.”
In the letter, Bishop writes:
Continue reading Lawsuit against publisher over retraction comes a step closer to reality
Authors have retracted a study just three months after publishing it, upon realizing they made “several critical errors.”
For one, the authors didn’t actually collect the data they claim to in the title of the paper, which reported on methods to screen patients for recurrence of lung cancer. The authors included data from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT), collected from 2003 to 2007 — but their institution didn’t have a PET/CT scanner until 2009. Instead, the authors had mistakenly reported the results of PET scans alone, which may not find tumors as effectively as PET/CT.
Here’s the retraction notice in Medicine, which explains the nature of the error in more detail. (Note: One of the authors supplied some missing text, in brackets.)
Continue reading Paper reports data from PET/CT scan, years before it arrived
A PLOS ONE paper about chronic pain plagiarized from multiple sources — 17, in fact.
According to the retraction notice released by the journal last week, the paper contains “extensive verbatim use of text from other sources.”
How did this make it past the editors? The journal published the paper in 2012 — before it began screening papers for plagiarism, according to a spokesperson.
Here’s the retraction notice for “The Effect of Social Stress on Chronic Pain Perception in Female and Male Mice:”
Continue reading PLOS ONE paper plagiarized from 17 articles — yes, 17
A mathematician has lost two publications that overlap substantially.
In this case, it’s easy to see how editors were duped (as it were). Both journals received the papers within a few months of each other, and then published them in quick succession; both have since been retracted. The papers share a first author, Jin Li, affiliated with Jiujiang University in China.
How similar are Li’s papers? See for yourself.
Here’s the abstract for “Landesman-Lazer type condition for second-order differential equations at resonance with impulsive effects,” received by Advances in Difference Equations in June 2014 and published in September 2014: Continue reading Two math papers are too similar, both retracted
A paper at the center of a high-profile case of alleged misconduct in Hong Kong has earned a correction notice.
The correction replaces an expression of concern on the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) paper, which followed allegations of data manipulation. It provides some un-cropped images, and removes a co-author from the paper. However, it does not appear to address previous allegations of misconduct, nor a recent ruling from an investigation at Hong Kong University (HKU), which found that some of the data were “invalid.”
Here is the correction notice for “Molecular Imaging of Peroxynitrite with HKGreen-4 in Live Cells and Tissues:”
Continue reading JACS corrects, removes author from previously flagged paper
Authors have admitted to using material from another lab for their paper on neuroblastoma.
A spokesperson for Springer told us that the theft came to light when:
The scientists, from whom the data originated, contacted the journal.
The editor in chief of the journal investigated the case, the spokesperson told us, and then issued this retraction notice:
Continue reading Cancer researchers: We took data from another lab
Science has a new editor-in-chief.
As of July 1st, Jeremy M. Berg will be at the helm of the family of journals published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, replacing Marcia McNutt. McNutt is leaving to become president of the National Academy of Sciences.
Berg, now associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning in the health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, has led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and was president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) from 2012-2014.
Berg who said in an AAAS press release that he is “thrilled and humbled by the opportunity to work with the team at Science and AAAS,” assumes the role following a year in which one of the world’s most prominent academic journals has faced significant scrutiny. Continue reading Science names new editor-in-chief
When authors get new data that revise a previous report, what should they do?
In the case of a 2015 lung cancer drug study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the journal published a letter to the editor with the updated findings.
Shortly after the paper was published, a pharmaceutical company released new data showing the drug wasn’t quite as effective as it had seemed. Once the authors included the new data in their analysis, they adjusted their original response rate of 59% — hailed as one of a few “encouraging results” in an NEJM editorial at the time of publication — to 45%, as they write in the letter. One of the authors told us they published the 2015 paper using less “mature” data because the drug’s benefits appeared so promising, raising questions about when to publish “exciting but still evolving data.”
It’s not a correction, as the original paper has not been changed; it doesn’t even contain a flag that it’s been updated. But among the online letters about the paper is one from the authors, “Update to Rociletinib Data with the RECIST Confirmed Response Rate,” which provides the new data and backstory:
Continue reading How should journals update papers when new findings come out?
A psychology journal is correcting a paper for reusing data. The editor told us the paper is a “piecemeal publication,” not a duplicate, and is distinct enough from the previous article that it is not “grounds for retraction.”
The authors tracked the health and mood of 65 patients over nine weeks. In one paper, they concluded that measures of physical well being and psychosocial well being positively predict one another; in the other (the now corrected paper), they concluded that health and mood (along with positive emotions) influence each other in a self-sustaining dynamic.
As a press release for the now-corrected paper put it: Continue reading Duplicated data gets corrected — not retracted — by psych journal