We can’t keep up with the growing number of retraction notices, so we’ve compiled a list of recent duplications to update our records.
1. Authors don’t always intentionally duplicate their own work, of course. The first paper on our list was retracted after the authors included a figure from a previous paper by accident, according to the publisher: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d (again): Do these data look familiar? They are
A paper accidentally credited the wrong researcher with providing part of an experiment.
It turns out that one of the authors supplied an expression vector to a Circulation paper about the molecular underpinnings of atherosclerosis — not the outside researcher originally thanked in the acknowledgements section.
The correction notice to the paper makes the situation sound more mysterious than it appears to be:
Continue reading Vector wasn’t a gift after all, correction notes
A plant sciences journal has pulled a 2016 paper for manipulated images after the study came under question at PubPeer.
According to the notice, the authors claim that the images were supplied by a “service provider;” the editor-in-chief of the journal told us he doesn’t have any details on this third party’s identity.
The first author of the retracted paper in Plant Science Today — Dibyendu Talukdar, from the University of Calcutta in West Bengal, India — has several other papers being questioned on PubPeer. His co-author, Tulika Talukdar, who is based at Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy Government College in West Bengal, India, according to her ResearchGate page, is a co-author on three of these papers. According to the present paper, however, Tulika Talukdar is affiliated with Raja Peary Mohan College, which is part of the University of Calcutta.
Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Botanist pair’s paper retracted, others questioned on PubPeer
Journals have retracted four papers from an author after uncovering evidence the peer review process had been compromised. Three papers have all common authors.
In one notice, issued last month, Annals of Human Genetics said it had reason to believe the paper had been reviewed by unqualified reviewers. Last year, another journal, Molecular Biology Reports, pulled two papers by the same group — all based at the China Medical University in Shenyang — all for peer-review issues. Additionally, Molecular Biology Reports also retracted another paper co-authored by Peng Liu last year, which did not include her other colleagues on the three other papers. All papers describe the epigenetic changes — modifications in expressions of genes — that may underlie cancer.
Here’s the retraction notice in the Annals of Human Genetics, published June 27: Continue reading Author, among others, loses four papers for “compromised” peer review
The author of a paper whose retraction notice says it was pulled at the behest of a company now says that wasn’t the case.
It’s a bit difficult to get this story straight: Although the retraction notice says a company complained the 2006 paper was “giving business inputs to their competitors,” the corresponding author told us no one asked him to retract the paper. Instead, he said, he was concerned about the inclusion of plant materials that belong to a previous employer, and did a “poor job” of explaining the reason for retraction. But since the results of the paper remain valid, Santosh Rajput — now a plant breeder at Dryland Genetics LLC in Ames, Iowa — told us he regrets asking to retract it:
A journal has retracted a case report after discovering it had already been reported.
The paper — about an “extremely rare” instance where a fetus was diagnosed with both a form of dwarfism and a chromosomal condition known as Klinefelter syndrome — was retracted from Case Reports in Obstetrics and Gynecology (CROG).
The first author of the paper told us the report was the result of a “big misunderstanding” between her and a former colleague, and she alerted the journal as soon as she noticed the case had already been reported in BMC Pediatrics.
Here’s the retraction notice for the paper: Continue reading One patient, two case reports: Journal retracts the latter
Nine years ago, a well-known pharmacologist hosted a researcher from another university in his lab. On a Saturday night last September, he learned while surfing Google Scholar that they had published a paper together.
Marco Cosentino, who works at the University of Insubria in Italy, know that Seema Rai, a zoologist at Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya in India, had collected data during during her six months in his lab, but had warned her they were too preliminary to publish. She published the data — on melatonin’s role in immunity — anyway, last summer in the Journal of Clinical & Cellular Immunology, listing Cosentino as the second author.
The day after he discovered the paper, Cosentino sent an email to the editor in chief of the journal, Charles Malemud, explaining why he did not approve of the publication:
Continue reading Unwitting co-author requests retraction of melatonin paper
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has retracted a paper that was one of eight flagged in a recent investigation by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The investigation — which concluded that a biologist had falsified or fabricated more than 40 images — resulted in a five-year funding ban.
In May, the ORI announced that John Pastorino, an erstwhile cell biologist at Rowan University in New Jersey, falsified and/or fabricated eight of his published papers (and one unpublished one). Nataly Shulga is a co-author on all eight papers. Six of those eight papers had already received expressions of concern (EOC).
The first retraction to result from the investigation is one of the two published papers that had not been tagged by an EOC. Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading 1st retraction for biologist who doctored 40+ images, received funding ban
Plant biologists have issued a major correction (what we dub “mega“) after realizing a significant mistake in their experiment.
The 2014 paper shows that a protein known as RAP plays a key role in chloroplast biogenesis. But as Ludwig Maximilians University-based authors Alexandra-Viola Bohne and Laura Kleinknecht continued to do their research, they found an error in the design of primers they used to synthesize the RNA for their experiments — and told us they are concerned other researchers could run into the same problem.
Although the authors considered retracting the paper, since its main conclusion was unaffected, they issued a correction notice, published in April in Plant Cell:
Continue reading “We were completely shocked:” Plant biologists issue mega-correction
The authors of a Molecular Cell paper have retracted it due to issues with multiple figures — including one with evidence of “intentional misconduct.”
According to the authors’ institution, IMIM in Barcelona, all co-authors are aware of the retraction. The penultimate author — Antonio García de Herreros — retracted three papers in May from the Journal of Biological Chemistry for reusing images to represent different experiments, and recently corrected multiple figures in a Journal of Cell Science paper over “possible duplications and/or splices.”
Here’s the newest retraction notice: Continue reading Authors pull Mol Cell paper for “inappropriate manipulation” of data