The authors of a paper on websites that sell cholesterol-lowering statin medications without prescriptions have retracted it. The move followed the threat of a lawsuit against the journal by a company included in the study that says it never dispenses sans a script.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Statins without prescription website paper retracted after company says it requires scripts, threatens suit
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
The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has an informative retraction notice about a recent paper it published that was marred by self-plagiarism. The article, “Current concepts of surveillance and its significance in head and neck cancer,” from a group of researchers at Grant Medical College, in Mumbai (which is known to this blog) and Royal Marsden Hospital in London, appeared last November. It soon was found to be awfully similar to a 2009 article by the same group of authors (sort of) in a different journal.
Here’s what the Annals had to say: Continue reading Surgery journal retracts cancer paper for duplication after “naive” response from authors
The International Journal of Impact Engineering has a highly technical retraction of an article whose authors discovered that crucial findings relied on a model that was different from the one they reported using in a particular figure.
The article, “Dynamic behavior of polymers at high strain-rates based on split Hopkinson pressure bar tests,” was published online last November by a pair of researchers from the U.K. and China. As the notice states:
Continue reading Flawed model leads to retraction of polymer paper
What do you do when it turns out the materials you used in your successful experiment weren’t actually the materials you thought they were?
If you’re Peter Zammit, of King’s College London, and colleagues, you retract a 2008 paper in the Journal of Cell Science. Here’s the notice, for “B-catenin promotes self-renewal of skeletal-muscle satellite cells:” Continue reading Authors retract Journal of Cell Science study after realizing they were using the wrong gene constructs
The senior author of a Journal of Immunology paper has retracted it after a university investigation found that he had inappropriately manipulated images, Retraction Watch has learned.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Cardiff University misconduct investigation leads to Journal of Immunology retraction
A good carpenter never blames his tools. But for scientists, sometimes machines do go bad–with disastrous results. Consider the following:
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has retracted two papers by researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States after the scientists learned that their results were based largely on a problem with their highly sensitive instruments.
A retraction notice appeared a few months ago in the Biophysical Journal:
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).
This article has been retracted at the request of Edward Egelman, Editor-in-Chief.
The editors have noted that there is a substantial overlap of figures and text between this Biophysical Journal article and D. Rutkauskas, V. Novoderezkhin, R.J. Cogdell and R. van Grondelle. Fluorescence spectral fluctuations of single LH2 complexes from Rhodopseudomonas acidophila strain 10050. Biochemistry, 43 (2004) 4431–4438, doi:10.1021/bi0497648. The submission of this paper was inconsistent with the Biophysical Journal policy which states: “Manuscripts submitted to Biophysical Journal (BJ) must be original; papers that have already been published or are concurrently submitted elsewhere for publication are not acceptable for submission. This includes manuscripts previously submitted to BJ, as well as material that has been submitted to other journals while BJ is considering the manuscript. If some part of the work has appeared or will appear elsewhere, the authors must give the specific details of such appearances in the cover letter accompanying the BJ submission. If previously published illustrative material, such as figures or tables, must be included, the authors are responsible for obtaining the appropriate permissions from the publisher(s) before the material may be published in BJ”. We are therefore retracting the publication of the Biophysical Journal article.
Ordinarily, such duplications go to the bottom of our list of retractions to cover, despite how common they are. There’s usually less of a story behind them than there is behind a completely opaque notice, or behind one that sports a whiff of fraud. But they’re still important, as Bruce Chabner, the editor of The Oncologist, pointed out in a recent issue of his journal in which a duplication retraction appeared: Continue reading Why editors should stop ignoring anonymous whistleblowers: Our latest LabTimes column
In 2009, Donald Williamson made what many biologists said was an extraordinary claim: The reason caterpillars become butterflies is that two different species accidentally mated with one another. As Brendan Borrell explained at the time in Scientific American: Continue reading A flying what? Symbiosis retracts paper claiming new species arise from accidental mating
Two weeks ago, we posted on a Nature Immunology retraction by a group that had earlier published a correction to figures in a Science paper. At the time, many readers suggested there was more to this story — and we had the same hunch.
Turns out those hunches were right.
Today, Science issued an “Expression of Concern” about the paper they’ve already corrected: Continue reading Science issues Expression of Concern over already-corrected Melendez-Puneet paper