Category: by country

“Truly extraordinary,” “simply not credible,” “suspiciously sharp:” A STAP stem cell peer review report revealed

science 62714Retraction Watch readers are of course familiar with the STAP stem cell saga, which was punctuated by tragedy last month when one of the authors of the two now-retracted papers in Nature committed suicide.

In June, Science‘s news section reported:

Sources in the scientific community confirm that early versions of the STAP work were rejected by Science, Cell, and Nature.

Parts of those reviews reviews have surfaced, notably in a RIKEN report. Science‘s news section reported:

For the Cell submission, there were concerns about methodology and the lack of supporting evidence for the extraordinary claims, says [stem cell scientist Hans] Schöler, who reviewed the paper and, as is standard practice at Cell, saw the comments of other reviewers for the journal. At Science, according to the 8 May RIKEN investigative committee’s report, one reviewer spotted the problem with lanes being improperly spliced into gel images. “This figure has been reconstructed,” the RIKEN report quotes from the feedback provided by a Science reviewer. The committee writes that the “lane 3” mentioned by the Science reviewer is probably the lane 3 shown in Figure 1i in the Nature article. The investigative committee report says [co-author Haruko] Obokata told the committee that she did not carefully consider the comments of the Science reviewer.

The entire reports, however, have not been made available. Retraction Watch has obtained the full text of the editor’s cover letter and reviews of the rejected Science paper. The reviews are full of significant questions and doubts about the work, as would be expected in a rejection. We present them here, to fill in some of the gaps and help readers consider how the research eventually made it through peer review: Continue reading “Truly extraordinary,” “simply not credible,” “suspiciously sharp:” A STAP stem cell peer review report revealed

Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal

jvcWhen we heard about this retraction, we were forced to ask: Are there any articles left in Journal of Vibration & Control?

The publication was forced to retract 60 papers by the same author in July, after he was caught exploiting a technological loophole to review his own papers.

Now, papers on loading cargo ships has been felled by a much less tech-savvy method: Two authors submitted a paper to both Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems and the Journal of Vibration & Control, both of which accepted and published the paper.

The authors, Yousef M. Al-Sweiti and Dirk Soeffker, have now lost three papers in total. Here’s the joint notice from SAGE and Taylor & Francis (we’ve added links to relevant retractions): Continue reading Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal

Fudged figures sink breast cancer paper

oncogeneA prestigious cancer journal has pulled an article over “concerns” regarding some of the figures, which PubPeer commenters had tagged as suspect.

A few weeks after the paper was published on June 9, comments on PubPeer began accumulating. Commenters called out both potentially manipulated and repeated images. The exact timeline is not clear, because Oncogene does not list a date on the retraction notice, but by August 29 the paper had been retracted.

Here’s the notice for “IL-6 secreted by cancer-associated fibroblasts induces tamoxifen resistance in luminal breast cancer,” by researchers at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine and Ruijin Hospital, both in Shanghai, China, and the University of Michigan: Continue reading Fudged figures sink breast cancer paper

87% of bugs resistant to antibiotics? Not so fast, as staph paper yanked after staff mistake

What could have been a truly scary study about drug resistant staph infections in hospitals has been retracted due to a lab error.

6.coverResearchers at a community hospital in Pittsburgh claimed that the commonly quoted 3% rate of staph that is resistant to ceftriaxone and sensitive to methicillin was drastically understated. However, an “honest error in the interpretation of a key lab test” called the findings into question.

Here’s the abstract: Continue reading 87% of bugs resistant to antibiotics? Not so fast, as staph paper yanked after staff mistake

Authors retract PNAS brain genetics paper for statistical issues

pnas 1113The authors of a paper on brain genetics published online in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) are retracting it for “a potential confound relating to statistical inference.”

Here’s the notice for “Identification of gene ontologies linked to prefrontal–hippocampal functional coupling in the human brain:” Continue reading Authors retract PNAS brain genetics paper for statistical issues

Tonic-clonic stats error sinks epilepsy paper

pm_cover_dez_01A brain imaging study in children with epilepsy has been retracted by the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging due to a statistics error.

Here’s the notice for “Microstructural Brain Abnormalities of Children of Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsy With Generalized Tonic-Clonic Seizure: A Voxel-Based Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging Study”: Continue reading Tonic-clonic stats error sinks epilepsy paper

Retraction appears for psychiatrist sought for arrest in alleged fraud scheme

malafosse
Alain Malafosse, via University of Geneva

Want bogus data, million-dollar fraud allegations and a scientist on the lam? We give you Alain Malafosse.

The British Journal of Psychiatry has retracted a June 2013 paper by Malafosse and his colleagues on the genetics of bipolar disorder in children because Malafosse allegedly fabricated key data in the study.

The article, “Childhood maltreatment and methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1 in bipolar disorder,” purported to find that people with bipolar disorder who had experienced more, and more severe, abuse early in life were more likely to show epigenetic changes. According to the abstract:

Continue reading Retraction appears for psychiatrist sought for arrest in alleged fraud scheme

Structure fumble sinks second of author’s JACS papers

jacsat_v136i001.inddProof that organic chemistry is hard for everyone, not just pre-meds: A paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society was retracted after the structures of compounds being studied were “misassigned.”

Another study by author Doo Ok Jang, also in JACS, was retracted in 2013 for the same reason; you can read our coverage here. Jang and Sang Yoon Kim published that one in 2008; the paper we’re talking about today was published in 2010 by Jang and Sung Jun Kim.

Here’s the notice for “Indium-Mediated Catalytic Enantioselective Allylation of N-Benzoylhydrazones Using a Protonated Chiral Amine:” Continue reading Structure fumble sinks second of author’s JACS papers

First author blamed for retraction in prestigious medical journal

jemcoverThe authors of a Journal of Experimental Medicine have retracted it, blaming the first author for data and figure manipulation.

The paper, “The requirements for natural Th17 cell development are distinct from those of conventional Th17 cells,” was initially published in September 2011 and has been cited 25 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. First author Jiyeon Kim was an MD-PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania until this year, according to a LinkedIn profile.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading First author blamed for retraction in prestigious medical journal

Authors ask Science to retract Hayabusa asteroid paper

jaxa_logoThe Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has requested that Science retract a 2006 paper about the makeup of asteroid Itokawa as observed from the spacecraft Hayabusa, the news section of Science reports.

Instead of calibrating their equipment on Earth, the scientists assumed they’d see both magnesium and silicon in the x-ray spectra, and used that assumption to assess the rest of the chemical composition of the asteroid.

The paper may be based on faulty assumptions, but the conclusions have been backed up by other published papers, according to the Science magazine report: Continue reading Authors ask Science to retract Hayabusa asteroid paper