Retired Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax made a career out of making up papers, many of them on the Bosnian genocide.
He retired from the Free University in Amsterdam in 2002. It wasn’t until 2013 that the university published a report indicating that Bax never published 61 of the papers he listed on his CV, and many of the real articles were based on fabricated data.
Publisher Taylor and Francis retracted one of Bax’s papers from Ethnic and Racial Studies in April. Now they’re retracting a second, from Ethnos, using almost identical language.
We don’t have much to go on here, for a retraction from the International Journal of Stem Cells.
Here’s what we do know: Dental researchers at several universities in Egypt, including Cairo University, Future University, and Misr University published a paper together. According to the article, they gave dogs oral ulcers and then injected the ulcers with either fat-derived stem cells, bone marrow stem cells, or saline. The researchers conclude that the fat stem cells, also known as adipose derived stem cells, helped the dogs heal.
Unfortunately, we have no idea what went wrong, because the retraction notice is useless. Here in its entirety is the notice for “Adipose Stem Cells as Alternatives for Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Oral Ulcer Healing”: Continue reading Stem cell study retraction produces useless notice
A Nature Cell Biology article on insulin regulation has been retracted after scientists noted that the antibodies used in their research were not as specific as they had previously believed.
The notice is clear on the problems with the science, which together “call into question the main conclusions of the paper.” Three of the paper’s five authors were employed at Novartis at the time of publication.
Frontiers in Pharmacology has retracted a paper on baicalin, an antioxidant sold in health food stores, because it had both “incorrect data and invalid statistical analyses.”
A comment on PubPeer notes that one of the figures (see image to the right) contains two similar-looking flow cytometry images labeled with different values, which could be what the retraction is hinting at.
A paper estimating the effects of limiting fast food meals with toys to under 550 calories has been retracted after concerns arose regarding the scientists’ use of an outdated model for estimating weight changes in kids.
The paper estimated that kids who eat fast food twice a week would avoid gaining two pounds a year if calorie limits are imposed on meals with toys. However, everyone we spoke to, and the notice, indicated that their estimate was inaccurate.
Here’s the notice for “Modeling Potential Effects of Reduced Calories in Kids’ Meals with Toy Giveaways”:
Most of the authors of two Molecular Cell papers have retracted them after becoming aware of inappropriate image manipulation by the first author of both — who refused to sign the notices.
Sixteen papers are being retracted across three Elsevier journals after the publisher discovered that one of the authors, Khalid Zaman, orchestrated fake peer reviews by submitting false contact information for his suggested reviewers.
This particular kind of scam has been haunting online peer review for a few years now, as loyal Retraction Watch readers know. This one is a classic of the genre: According to Elsevier’s director of publishing services, Catriona Fennell, an editor first became suspicious after noticing that Zaman’s suggested reviewers, all with non-institutional addresses, were unusually kind to the economist’s work.
Elsevier has actually hired a full-time staff member with a PhD in physics and history as a managing editor to do the grunt work on cases like this. Flags were first raised in August, at which point the ethics watchdog went to town digging through all of Zaman’s other publications looking for suspicious reviews coming from non-institutional addresses provided by the scientist, an economist at COMSATS Information Technology Center in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
A team of entomologists in India had to put their new species celebration on hold last year, when they found out their discovery had already been discovered.
The Journal of Insect Science paper, initially published in December 2012, was retracted in October 2013, after several entomologists confirmed that the beetle was actually a previously identified species called Acanthophorus serraticornis. (The notice has a November 2014 date, but we understand that’s because the journal switched servers.)
Jens Christian Schwamborn, a stem cell researcher at the University of Luxembourg, is retracting a 2007 paper on how to grow brain cells.
The paper, “Ubiquitination of the GTPase Rap1B by the ubiquitin ligase Smurf2 is required for the establishment of neuronal polarity,” was published while Schwamborn was at Westfälische Wilhelms‐Universität Münster in Germany. An anonymous critic had sent questions about the study to Germany’s DFG in the middle of last year, and later to Paul Brookes, who posted them on PubMed Commons.
Retired Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax made a career out of making up papers, many of them on the Bosnian genocide.
