Category: by country

Misconduct burns authors of wax paper, leads to sharply worded retraction notice

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A is retracting a 2010 paper whose authors misappropriated data, forged an author name — and got a pretty strong backhand slap for the trouble.

The paper, “Green waxes, adhesives and lubricants,” which refers to eco-friendly materials, not Halloween-friendly slimes, was published by a group of researchers from China and Canada. Problem was, the one from Canada evidently didn’t know she was listed on the manuscript, and a big chunk of the work had been misappropriated from her university.

As the notice explains: Continue reading Misconduct burns authors of wax paper, leads to sharply worded retraction notice

Updated: Ski resort paper hits a (media) mogul and gets retracted

With temperatures at Retraction Watch’s New York HQ threatening to break 100 degrees today — that’s nearly 38 degrees Celsius for those of you in the rest of the world — what better way to take our minds off the heat than by writing about than skiing?

Lucky for us, the author of a paper in the Journal of Maps about new ways to create ski resort maps — aka the “Breckenridge schematic map” — has retracted it. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Updated: Ski resort paper hits a (media) mogul and gets retracted

JPET peeves: Paper withdrawn after drug company won’t disclose chemical structure

A group of researchers at the drug company ChemoCentryx is withdrawing a 2012 paper in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics over failure to appropriately identify the molecule they describe in the article.

The withdrawal notice tells the story: Continue reading JPET peeves: Paper withdrawn after drug company won’t disclose chemical structure

Serial plagiarizers banned from dermatology journal forever

Last August, we brought you the news that the Indian Journal of Dermatology had banned a group of Tunisian researchers from publishing in the journal for five years, because they had plagiarized in a 2009 study.

Well, the journal’s editors found another case in which the authors have plagiarized, and now they’re banned from the journal for good. Here’s the notice, which describes both cases: Continue reading Serial plagiarizers banned from dermatology journal forever

Three more Fujii papers fall for lack of IRB approval

Three journals under the JAMA umbrella are retracting papers by Yoshitaka Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist accused of research misconduct so sweeping that it might net him the record for most retractions by a single author.

The papers, in the Archives of Surgery, Archives of Ophthalmology and the Archives of Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery, were published in 2001 and 2005.

Here are the notices, which are essentially identical but for the titles of the articles: Continue reading Three more Fujii papers fall for lack of IRB approval

PLoS ONE expresses concern over flu vaccine paper

via Wikimedia

PLoS ONE has issued an expression of concern over a  2010 paper by Chinese scientists about how the immune system responds to the vaccine against the swine flu.

The article, “Protection Induced on Day 10 Following Administration of the 2009 A/H1N1 Pandemic Influenza Vaccine,” claimed to study 58 subjects given the inoculation (more on that below) and that Continue reading PLoS ONE expresses concern over flu vaccine paper

Tell-tale hearts: Cardiology journals retract redundant articles

The European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery has retracted a 2007 article by Chinese researchers after the senior author decided he liked the data so nice he’d publish them twice. And he appears to have done so without the knowledge of the corresponding author.

Here’s the notice for the paper, titled “Open-heart surgery in patients with liver cirrhosis”: Continue reading Tell-tale hearts: Cardiology journals retract redundant articles

Shikeagi Kato, who resigned post in March, retracts Nature paper

Shikeagi Kato, an endocrinologist formerly of the University of Tokyo who resigned on March 31 amidst an investigation into his work, has retracted another paper, this one in Nature.

Here’s the notice for “DNA demethylation for hormone-induced transcriptional derepression,” which was the subject of a correction last October: Continue reading Shikeagi Kato, who resigned post in March, retracts Nature paper

Circulation retracts four papers by author who misled on IRB approval

Circulation has retracted four articles by a pediatric cardiologist in Japan who failed to obtain ethics approval for the studies in question but evidently lied about it to the journal.

The researcher, Hideaki Senzaki, of Saitama Medical University, is a highly-published investigator who trained for a time with at Johns Hopkins.

According to the Circulation notice: Continue reading Circulation retracts four papers by author who misled on IRB approval

Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes

Researchers deleted more genes than they bargained for in a Drosophila strain, a mistake that resulted in a retraction of a paper from 2007.

Ron Wides, a biologist specializing in pattern development at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and colleagues have retracted a paper published in Mechanisms of Development after his lab found that their technique to delete the Ten-a gene ended up deleting other nearby genes, too.

It was deletions of other genes, and not Ten-a, that killed the fruit flies, Wides concluded. His group had also concluded, erroneously, that Ten-a is what’s known as a “pair-rule” gene. Fruit fly embryos develop in stacked segments, like tubes of Pringles; pair-rule genes guide the development of alternating segments. Those other loci, and not Ten-a, caused lethality and caused the flies to develop improperly early,  Wides concluded.

The retraction reads in full: Continue reading Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes