A coding switcharoo caused a paper Society & Natural Resources to be retracted. But the authors say that not all is lost, since correcting the data gave them a better understanding of how the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fines companies that pollute in poor and minority neighborhoods.
The retraction notice reads: Continue reading Paper on “evidence for environmental racism” in EPA polluter fines retracted for coding error
Here at Retraction Watch, we’ve covered retractions for misconduct, journal errors, editorial system hacking and even no particular reason.
And that’s just in the last week.
However, we’ve identified a new reported reason: carelessness. A paper in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry claimed to show how a tiny RNA causes fat cells to die.
Instead, the paper died.
Turned out that rather than describe previously published data, the authors say they inadvertently included a figure that had already appeared in another paper.
The retraction for “miR-598 induces replicative senescence in human adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cells via silent information regulator 1,” reads, in full: Continue reading RNA paper retracted for “carelessness in including some of the figures”
An environmental engineer at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University has been forced to retract a paper amid an ethics committee investigation into whether he had the right to publish it.
The Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology retracted a study from the Vitaly Gitis lab just months after its publication: Continue reading Environmental engineer loses paper after co-authors say he didn’t have permission to publish it
The authors of a study on cancer incidence and survival in the Dutch migrant community have retracted it after realizing they’d made some errors that significantly affected the results.
But in what seems like an appropriate reward for coming forward, the newly analyzed data, with additional information, will be part of a forthcoming paper in another journal by the same authors.
The original retrospective study came out in May 2011 in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention and found that risk and survival of breast and stomach cancers differed depending on the person’s mother country. The problem was that the study jumbled up many of the participants’ homelands during the analysis.
The authors issued the following retraction: Continue reading Jumbled analysis leads to retraction of cancer study — but also another paper
The authors of a clinical study of an herbal medication have retracted after it became clear that one of the study authors had included two figures without the consent of his co-investigators.
The paper was a study of Green Cross Corporation of Korea’s SHINBARO, which was approved last year for the treatment of osteoarthritis by the Korean FDA.
The editors of the Archives of Pharmacal Research, where the research found a home, ran this notice: Continue reading Herbal arthritis remedy study retracted for “copyright issues”
Why just have three peer-reviewed publications when you can reuse figures to publish a fourth?
That’s the sort of thinking that got one research group slapped with a retraction of their 2009 study, “Carbon Nanotubes Are Able To Penetrate Plant Seed Coat and Dramatically Affect Seed Germination and Plant Growth.”
The journal ACS Nano, published by the American Chemical Society, issued the retraction on Aug. 20: Continue reading Reused figures lead to two chemistry retractions, one correction
We’ve found another retraction for a paper bySangiliyandi Gurunathan, the former researcher at Kalasalingam University in India fired over multiple instances of data fabrication that also caused six Ph.D. students to get kicked out of their program.
The retraction was published In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology – Animal in October 2011 but we only saw it last month. It reads, in full: Continue reading Fired Kalasalingam prof Gurunathan’s retraction count stands at eight
A materials researcher faced three months without salary, retired from his research position and may have to return a portion of a grant worth $1 million US as punishment after a postdoc in his lab was caught fabricating data.
Seizo Miyata, formerly a materials researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, headed a group that worked on carbon alloy catalysts. Last year, Miyata told Retraction Watch, he found evidence that postdoc Wu Libin had fabricated data.
Reached by Retraction Watch by phone, Miyata didn’t say who uncovered the evidence, nor how, but when he confronted Libin, the postdoc confessed. Miyata said he alerted Texas Tokyo Tech administrators last year, and requested the retraction of “Preparation of carbon-based catalysts for PEFC cathodes from aromatic polyamide with Fe compound,” which appeared in Applied Catalysis A: General in July 2011. That retraction notice reads: Continue reading Former Tokyo Tech materials researcher sanctioned after bringing forward evidence of data fabrication
A pair of authors have retracted a paper in Nutrition Reviews after it became clear that parts were plagiarized from work by a nutritionist who had died in an accident just weeks after writing the material.
The retraction reads in full: Continue reading Authors retract nutrition review that plagiarized deceased researcher
Seyed Rasoul Mousavi, assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the Isfahan University of Technology in Khomeynīshahr, Iran, has been working on a way to help biologists assemble genomes with as little information as possible.
Last year, Mousavi submitted a manuscript to the Journal of Theoretical Biology, received acceptance after peer review, and got proofs back to edit.
For technical reasons, Mousavi says his corrections didn’t make it into the final article published on Jan. 12, so the publishers issued a separate corrigendum with the editorial changes. Then, on Feb. 8, the publishers retracted the corrigendum that accompanied the original article. The retraction of the corrigendum reads: Continue reading What happens when a correction is retracted?