Category: uk retractions

Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices

We can only imagine how Joe Hollyfield felt to learn from us, of all people, that his journal, Experimental Eye Research, had retracted two manuscripts in a recent issue.

The papers, “Mechanisms of retinal ganglion cell injury and defense in glaucoma,” by Qu J, Wang D, and Grosskreutz CL, and “Mitochondria: Their role in ganglion cell death and survival in primary open angle glaucoma,” by Osborne, NN, carried the same retraction notices:

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.

Because in our experience such unhelpful wording often masks interesting details — read, author misconduct — we called Hollyfield for comment. He graciously walked us through the retractions, explaining the case in detail, until we realized that we were talking about different papers entirely. Hollyfield, it turned out, thought we were asking about the travails of Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, an eye researcher from India whom we’d previously covered and whose work recently had been retracted by Experimental Eye Research and other journals for image manipulation.

But Hollyfield was unaware of the two retractions we’d intended to talk about with him and told us he’d look into them.

Here’s what he learned: Continue reading Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices

Imperial committee to weigh “validity” of Ahluwalia’s PhD following second retraction

Earlier this week, we reported on the retraction of another paper by Jatinder Ahluwalia, whose record of misconduct has left marks at Cambridge and University College London. Today, a spokesperson for Imperial College London, where the soon-to-be-retracted work formed the basis of Ahluwalia’s PhD, tells Retraction Watch that a committee will review Ahluwalia’s doctorate: Continue reading Imperial committee to weigh “validity” of Ahluwalia’s PhD following second retraction

Another retraction for Jatinder Ahluwalia, in Journal of Neurochemistry

The Journal of Neurochemistry will retract a paper by Jatinder Ahluwalia, the scientist who recently left his post at the University of East London following an investigation into his work.

Ahluwalia was lead author of the 2003 paper, “Activation of capsaicin-sensitive primary sensory neurones induces anandamide production and release,” while earning his PhD at Imperial College London. It had already been the subject of a June 2010 correction. That correction blamed the paper’s problems on a typo:  Continue reading Another retraction for Jatinder Ahluwalia, in Journal of Neurochemistry

Jatinder Ahluwalia out at University of East London: report

Jatinder Ahluwalia, whose story Retraction Watch has been following since last fall, is no longer working at the University of East London, according to a report in today’s Times Higher Education.

Ahluwalia, Retraction Watch readers may recall, came to our attention in the fall after he and his colleagues were forced to retract a paper in Nature. A University College London (UCL) investigation revealed that Ahluwalia had faked results, and probably sabotaged his colleagues’ work. We then learned, from a source, that Ahluwalia had been dismissed from Cambridge University’s graduate program — his first attempt to get a PhD — in 1998.

Given all of these revelations, the University of East London — where Ahluwalia had been a faculty member since leaving UCL — and Imperial College London, where he earned his PhD, both began investigations into his work. Last week, we reported that Imperial had finishing re-running all of his experiments, and was reviewing the results.

Today, as the Times Higher Education reported, his faculty page has been removed: Continue reading Jatinder Ahluwalia out at University of East London: report

Imperial, where Jatinder Ahluwalia earned his PhD, has re-run experiments, and is now reviewing results

If you’ve been wondering what’s happening in the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia, the University of East London researcher who has been found guilty of faking data as a graduate student at Cambridge and of misconduct at University College London, so have we.

We last reported, in February, that Imperial College London, where Ahluwalia earned his PhD, was repeating his key experiments “in light of new information received.” Today, an Imperial spokesperson tells Retraction Watch that those repeat experiments are complete, and “the results are currently being reviewed by the College.” We look forward to hearing the results of that review, of course.

A reminder that Ahluwalia’s current institution, the University of East London, is also reviewing his work. We’ve heard nothing from UEL, despite several requests. That’s consistent with the idea that the university has placed a gag order on its faculty and administration, although we haven’t confirmed that either.

In fact, we’re hearing a lot of rumors about this case, many of them left as anonymous comments, and while we appreciate any tips, we do our best to confirm verifiable facts before posting, even in comments. So if anyone has documentation of what’s going on, we’d welcome it.

We’ve also seen Ahluwalia apparently take a page out of the Anil Potti playbook, using social media and setting up a blog to extol his own virtues. Various sites discuss his papers and charitable donations, and he also has a Twitter feed that has a lot to say about the weather. Oddly, none of them mention the misconduct findings.

One of the comments left on his blog was from “MikeUSA”: Continue reading Imperial, where Jatinder Ahluwalia earned his PhD, has re-run experiments, and is now reviewing results

Geology retraction unearths a dead co-author and plagiarized image of “Himalayan” rock actually from Norway

The journal Geology has retracted a paper that, when it was published in May 2010, was hailed as a major step forward in understanding what happened when the Indian and Asian land masses collided millions of years ago. As The Hindu reported when the paper was first published:

Dr. [Anju] Pandey and her colleagues used sophisticated analytical techniques to demonstrate the occurrence of relict majorite, a variety of mineral garnet, in rocks collected from the Himalayas. Majorite is stable only under ultra-high pressure conditions, meaning that it must have been formed very deep down in the Earth’s crust, before surfacing millions of years later.

“Our findings are significant because researchers have disagreed about the depth of subduction of the Indian plate beneath Asia,” said Dr. Pandey.

In fact, the previous depth estimates conflicted with estimates based on computer models. The new results suggest that the leading edge of the Indian plate sank to a depth around double that of previous estimates.

“Our results are backed up by computer modelling and will radically improve our understanding of the subduction of the Indian continental crust beneath the Himalayas,” said Pandey, according to an NOC release.

It turns out, however, that as best as anyone can tell, the key data are from Norway, not the Himalayas, and were published in 1998 by another group. According to the retraction notice, which appears in the May 2011 issue (link to 1998 paper added): Continue reading Geology retraction unearths a dead co-author and plagiarized image of “Himalayan” rock actually from Norway

Journal of Neuroscience retracts two, one 13 years old

The June 8 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience includes two retractions:

The notices are completely uninformative. They read: Continue reading Journal of Neuroscience retracts two, one 13 years old

So when is a retraction warranted? The long and winding road to publishing a failure to replicate

Sometime in 2009, the University of Nottingham’s Uwe Vinkemeier thought something was wrong with two papers he read in Genes & Development, one from 2006 and one from 2009. The papers claimed to show how changes to a protein called STAT1 affect programmed cell death. So he did what scientists are supposed to do: He tried to repeat the experiments, to replicate the results.

He couldn’t.

So he submitted the results to G&D, which was initially willing to publish the data along with a rebuttal by the original authors. But everyone seemed to be dragging their feet. Continue reading So when is a retraction warranted? The long and winding road to publishing a failure to replicate

Psychology Today apparently retracts Kanazawa piece on why black women are “rated less physically attractive”

Psychology Today has apparently yanked a blog post by London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa that wondered why black women were considered less attractive than other women.

The post, titled “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?” was posted yesterday and available here, but that page now returns a 503 error.

A number of people have archived the post, however, including a communications and media professional who blogs at Chic.Seven. Her pdf is available here.

The post uses data from Add Health, a federally funded study:

Add Health was developed in response to a mandate from the U.S. Congress to fund a study of adolescent health, and Waves I and II focus on the forces that may influence adolescents’ health and risk behaviors, including personal traits, families, friendships, romantic relationships, peer groups, schools, neighborhoods, and communities. As participants have aged into adulthood, however, the scientific goals of the study have expanded and evolved. Wave III, conducted when respondents were between 18 and 26 years old, focuses on how adolescent experiences and behaviors are related to decisions, behavior, and health outcomes in the transition to adulthood.

Excerpts of the post, which really needs the graphs Kanazawa included — available at Chic.Seven’s blog — to be remotely comprehensible: Continue reading Psychology Today apparently retracts Kanazawa piece on why black women are “rated less physically attractive”

Feminism & Psychology study of UK birthing classes draws ire, winds up retracted

The debate — in entrenched medical circles, anyway — over whether it’s safe to give birth at home can be fierce. Just last month, for example, Nature reported that a review of the subject in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that found home births more dangerous than those in the hospital generated so much controversy that it forced an investigation. Outside reviewers found problems, but the journal didn’t think they rose to the level of a retraction. Critics disagreed.

The same fraught subject came up in a paper published in Feminism & Psychology last year by Mary Horton-Salway and Abigail Locke. The original paper had concluded:

Our analysis suggests that the normativity of medical interventions in labour and childbirth is discursively reproduced in ante-natal classes whilst parental choice is limited by a powerful ‘rhetoric of risk’.

In other words, NCT classes were scaring women into choosing hospital births. But it turns out that conclusion wasn’t actually supported by the findings, which were based on a review of National Childbirth Trust’s classes. That led to a retraction: Continue reading Feminism & Psychology study of UK birthing classes draws ire, winds up retracted