Category: by country

Reason behind opaque Antioxidants & Redox Signaling retraction notice revealed

There’s an unhelpful retraction notice online in the journal Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, a Mary Ann Liebert publication. The paper, “Inhibition of LXRalpha-dependent steatosis and oxidative injury by liquiritigenin, a licorice flavonoid, as mediated with Nrf2 activation,” has been removed from the site, except for the abstract, which now has this in front of it:

THIS WORK HAS BEEN RETRACTED BY THE AUTHORS

That, as we’ve said before in exasperation, certainly clears things right up.

But we found out the reason for the retraction from Paul S. Brookes, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Here’s the letter he sent the editors of Antioxidants & Redox Signaling and Free Radical Biology and Medicine, an Elsevier title: Continue reading Reason behind opaque Antioxidants & Redox Signaling retraction notice revealed

Materials paper retracted after post-doc’s plagiarism

The Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine has retracted a 2011 paper after it was determined that the first author, then a post-doc at the University of Michigan, had plagiarized from another publication.

The first author of the retracted article, “Functionalization of titanium based metallic biomaterials for implant applications,” was the post-doc, Rahul Bhola, who received his PhD from the Colorado School of Mines and went to Michigan to work in the lab of Catherine Krull.

Fruit of that relationship was the paper — and here’s how that worked out: Continue reading Materials paper retracted after post-doc’s plagiarism

Breaking news: Prolific Dutch heart researcher fired over misconduct concerns

Don Poldermans, a leading heart specialist, has been fired over concerns that he committed research misconduct. According to a report on the website DutchNews.nl:

Erasmus University in Rotterdam has sacked a professor in cardio-vascular medicine for damaging the institution’s academic integrity and for ‘scientific misconduct’, the NRC reports on Thursday.

The professor is accused of faking academic data and compromising patient trust, the paper says. In particular, he failed to obtain patient consent for carrying out research and recorded results ‘which cannot be resolved to patient information,’ the university said.

Don Poldermans has spent years researching the risk of complications during cardio-vascular surgery and has some 500 publications to his name.

A spokesman for Poldermans told the paper he admitted not keeping to research protocols but denied faking data. Continue reading Breaking news: Prolific Dutch heart researcher fired over misconduct concerns

Retraction comes as death of PI leads to lost records

The Journal of Experimental Medicine has retracted a 2011 article after the principal investigator’s home institution suggested that the PI might have manipulated his data. Complicating matters, the PI in this case died two weeks after the paper appeared and his notes have gone missing — making an affirmative declaration of fraud or honest error difficult.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction comes as death of PI leads to lost records

Physics retraction as rogue authors add six colleagues to a paper they didn’t write

Forged authorship — in which researchers add the names of people who’ve had nothing to do with a paper, either to boost its chance of being published, pay tribute (in a misguided way), or both — has become a common theme at Retraction Watch. But we’re pretty sure we haven’t seen a case involving as many faked authors as a now-retracted paper in Europhysics Letters. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Physics retraction as rogue authors add six colleagues to a paper they didn’t write

Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists

About two years ago, Marc Duflot, a research engineer at Cenaero, heard a disturbing tale from a collaborator. The collaborator, it seemed, had been asked to review a paper submitted to a journal, and noticed that it was remarkably similar to a paper by Duflot. Duflot’s collaborator recommended that the journal reject the paper, and it did. Duflot tells Retraction Watch (we added a link to the paper in question):

Then, several months later, I discovered that the…paper had been submitted and accepted in Meccanica. If I remember correctly, I discovered it by searching the web with Google Scholar with terms related to my field of expertise.

So in January 2010, Duflot wrote to the editors of Meccanica to alert them to the plagiarism by the authors, M. Garzon and D. Sargoso of the University of Madrid. He concluded his email:

I am deeply disappointed by the fraudulent behaviour of M. Garzon and D. Sargoso. Strangely, I cannot find any mention of these two people on the web neither of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Madrid. Otherwise, I would have reported this to the head of their department.

An editorial assistant got back to him: Continue reading Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists

Hormesis? Information scant in unhelpful retraction notice (Psst: It was plagiarism)

The latest issue of Dose-Response, the official journal of the International Dose-Response Society, has one of the uninformative retraction notices we’ve come to hate for their inscrutability: Continue reading Hormesis? Information scant in unhelpful retraction notice (Psst: It was plagiarism)

Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat

When we broke the story last week about a juicy retraction notice in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) — known by its readers as “the Gray Journal” — we wrote that there was more to it than we suspected. That’s an understatement.

As we reported, the AJOG retracted an article that it had published earlier this year because 1) the author, Laurence Cole, had failed to disclose a potential financial conflict of interest with a pregnancy test maker named Church & Dwight; and 2) the article lacked a “credible scientific reason given for conducting the study,” along with other flaws detailed in the notice. (As we wrote the other day, we wonder why those issues did not arise during the initial review of the manuscript — but more on that shortly.)

We’ve since learned that the journal’s move came after it received a sharply worded letter from a high-powered San Francisco lawyer demanding immediate retraction of the article on the grounds that it represented a “substantial” threat to the financial health of his client. That client? A maker of home pregnancy tests who is now in the process of suing the very firm that provided Cole with research funding he failed to disclose.

First, here’s what Cole,  the hormone expert at the University of New Mexico whose paper the journal retracted, said about why he didn’t disclose that funding: Continue reading Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat

Expression of Concern for a Bulfone-Paus paper

Retraction Watch readers may recall the story of Silvia Bulfone-Paus, who has been forced to retract 12 papers and has another under review at Blood. All of that scrutiny came after an investigation by her home institution, Germany’s Borstel Institute, that found evidence of image manipulation.

The latest development is perhaps no surprise. It concerns a review Bulfone-Paus and her colleagues published in BioEssays in 2006. Here’s the Expression of Concern, which was published online in July but just came our attention (we’ve added links to our coverage of specific retractions): Continue reading Expression of Concern for a Bulfone-Paus paper

Retraction (in all but name) of flu paper raises eyebrows

When is a retraction not a retraction? Why, when it’s a correction, of course — like the one the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases issued this month:

In the article Reassortment of Ancient Neuraminidase and Recent Hemagglutinin in Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Virus (P. Bhoumik, A.L. Hughes), errors were made in selection of the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) sequences for the initial and subsequent data sets. As a result, the authors incorrectly concluded that the NA gene of the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus is of a more ancient lineage than the HA. Other researchers (and the authors) have not been able to reproduce the findings when using HA and NA matched pairs from viruses chosen on the basis of geography and time and correctly have pointed out errors in the data set that make the original conclusions invalid.

In other words, 1) the article was based largely on an error and 2) the central point could not be reproduced, two flaws that, at least in our book, usually constitute grounds for retraction.

The paper was written by Priyasma Bhoumik and Austin Hughes. Bhoumik, now a post-doc at Harvard, at the time was a PhD student at the University of South Carolina, where Hughes is a senior faculty member. Funding for the work came to Hughes from the National Institutes of Health, according to the original article.

We spoke with Hughes, who said that in this case, correction versus retraction is a distinction without a difference: Continue reading Retraction (in all but name) of flu paper raises eyebrows