Category: france

Off with his paper! Some authors want to retract claim to have identified Henry IV’s head

Henry IV, via Wikimedia
Henry IV, via Wikimedia

The BMJ is well-known for its annual Christmas issue, which New York Times medical correspondent Lawrence Altman calls

a lighter and sometimes brighter side of medicine, publishing unusual articles that vary from simply amusing to bizarre to creative or potentially important.

The 2010 issue was no exception, featuring a paper called “Multidisciplinary medical identification of a French king’s head (Henri IV)” in which: Continue reading Off with his paper! Some authors want to retract claim to have identified Henry IV’s head

Plagiarism leads to retraction of conduction paper

physica bPhysica B: Condensed Matter has retracted a 2013 paper by a group from Morocco and France for, well, inappropriate condensation of printed matter.

The article, “Granular and intergranular conduction in La1.32Sr1.68Mn2O7 layered manganite system,” came mostly from a team of physicists at  University Ibn Zohr, and appeared in June.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Plagiarism leads to retraction of conduction paper

Retraction for iffy data as authors of chicken enzyme paper lay an egg

IntjrnbiolmacroThe authors of an article in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules have pulled the paper in what appears to be an authorship dispute sparked by premature submission.

The paper, “Renaturation and one step purification of the chicken GIIA secreted phospholipase A2 from inclusion bodies,” came from a group of researchers in Tunisia and Marseille, France, and was published online last May. It has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As the abstract states:

Continue reading Retraction for iffy data as authors of chicken enzyme paper lay an egg

Paper on rare pediatric lung cancer retracted for misstatements, unknowing authors

logo-journalecancermedicalscience (officially in the running for the most cumbersome journal title we’ve run across) has retracted a 2013 case report for a litany of sins.

The article, “Primary extraosseous Ewing sarcoma of the lung in children,” came from a group in France: Nidal Alsit, Clara Fernandez, Jean Luc Michel , Linda Sakhri, Audrey Derouet and Augustin Pirvu.

Or at least that’s what the author information suggested. Continue reading Paper on rare pediatric lung cancer retracted for misstatements, unknowing authors

Researchers get a mulligan: JBC paper withdrawn sans explanation

jbc july 2013A group of authors has withdrawn a paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), but readers won’t know why.

The paper, “Static High-Gradient Magnetic Fields Activate Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 4 (TRPV4) Ion Channels Enabling Remote Control of Cell Function,” whose corresponding author is Thomas Simmet of Ulm University, appeared online on June 11. Since June 24, the PDF of the paper has been stamped: Continue reading Researchers get a mulligan: JBC paper withdrawn sans explanation

Two retractions in polymer journal, including group’s second for “pervasive misattribution of data”

j applied polymer scienceLast November, we wrote about the retraction of a paper from the Journal of Vinyl and Additive Technology for “pervasive misattribution of data” that rendered “the article’s subsequent discussion and conclusions meaningless and misleading.”

The group now has another retraction, for exactly the same reason. The new notice appears in the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, and the language is identical, because the two journals are both published by Wiley: Continue reading Two retractions in polymer journal, including group’s second for “pervasive misattribution of data”

French journal retracts nanomedicine paper for ethics violations, more

bioladjcoverThe French journal Biologie Aujourd’hui — Biology Today — has retracted an article it published earlier this year after learning of ethics violations,  authorship issues with the paper and a problematic image.

The article, titled “Utilisation de dendrimères pour une nanomédecine innovatrice,” or “Using dendrimers for an innovative nanomedicine,” was written by Jean Pierre Majoral of the Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination in Toulouse. (We haven’t been able to get our virtual hands on the paper yet.)

According to the retraction notice, which in fact says “withdrawal notice“:  Continue reading French journal retracts nanomedicine paper for ethics violations, more

Infant formula paper smells like salami, retracted

semperinatolcoverSeminars in Perinatology has retracted a 2002 paper by a group of authors in France and Belgium who’d used a previously published article (their own) as a template for the benighted work.

The article, “Nitrogen utilization and bone mineralization in very low birth weight infants fed partially hydrolyzed preterm formula,” by Jean-Charles Picaud and colleagues, appeared in December 2002. But it was based largely on this May 2001 paper in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, titled “Nutritional Efficacy of Preterm Formula With a Partially Hydrolyzed Protein Source: A Randomized Pilot Study.”

According to the retraction notice:

Continue reading Infant formula paper smells like salami, retracted

Pfizer database errors cause two voluminous retractions for JACC statin-biomarker papers

Jacc1212coverCoding errors in a database maintained by Pfizer have led authors to retract two heart biomarker papers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The two notices, for “Prediction of cardiovascular events in statin-treated patients by lipid and non-lipid biomarkers” and “Plasma PCSK9 levels and clinical outcomes in the TNT (Treating to New Targets) Trial,” are highly detailed and say the same thing: Continue reading Pfizer database errors cause two voluminous retractions for JACC statin-biomarker papers

Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters

We’re not sure how many you need for a “slew,” but we’ve seen five retractions in Neuroscience Letters recently, most of them because researchers republished translations of papers in English, so we thought we’d round them up in a post.

We’ll start the count — appropriately, we think — with the notice for “Simple mental arithmetic is not so simple: An ERP study of the split and odd–even effects in mental arithmetic“, published in February by researchers from Nanjing Normal University in China: Continue reading Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters