united states – Page 134 – Retraction Watch

Retracted retraction leaves Genomics paper intact — but authors wonder if anyone will know

Last March, the journal Genomics retracted a paper, “Discovery of transcriptional regulators and signaling pathways in the developing pituitary gland by bioinformatic and genomic approaches,” for reasons that don’t really fit into a tight lede sentence. Let’s just say that at times the problems involved both questions of authorship and the validity of the research. More on all that in a moment.

Meanwhile, things change. Now the journal, an Elsevier title, is un-retracting (that can’t be a real word, can it?) the retraction. You’d think that would please the authors, and it does to an extent. But they also wonder, legitimately, whether the original retraction will refuse to relinquish its grip on the resurrected article and consign it to database oblivion.

First, some background. Continue reading Retracted retraction leaves Genomics paper intact — but authors wonder if anyone will know

Report on pot and crime goes up in smoke as RAND retracts it

pot — photo by Torbin Bjorn Hansen via Flickr http://flic.kr/p/4v9zbC

Maybe they just hallucinated it.

The RAND Corporation has retracted a study linking Los Angeles pot dispensaries to drops in crime, the Los Angeles Times reports. The problem: RAND hadn’t included data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The institute tells the Times, referring to RAND researchers:

“They made mistakes,” said Debra Knopman, a Rand vice president and director of the infrastructure, safety and environment division. “What we’re wrestling with is how the mistakes went undetected.”

The report was peer-reviewed, RAND said, and retractions are uncommon: Continue reading Report on pot and crime goes up in smoke as RAND retracts it

Two detailed retraction notices appear in PNAS

We’ve fallen a bit behind in our coverage of retractions in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), so we wanted to call attention to two very helpful ones from recent months.

Here’s one notice, which appeared online on August 5: Continue reading Two detailed retraction notices appear in PNAS

Transparency in action as genetics paper falls to fraud — and lots of it

Talk about a career-killer. The following retraction, from Genetics and Molecular Research, an online journal, spares nothing in its evisceration of an unfortunate graduate student who compiled an impressive list of transgressions in a single manuscript.

The 2010 article, titled “Genetics and biochemical analyses of sensor kinase A in Bacillus subtilis sporulation,” came from the lab of Masaya Fujita at the University of Houston. The first author was a now-former graduate student named Jean-Calvin Nguele. Whether the title is accurate, we can’t say, but apparently not much else was.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Transparency in action as genetics paper falls to fraud — and lots of it

New in PNAS: Potti retraction number seven, and a Potti correction

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has published the seventh retraction for former Duke researcher Anil Potti, who now faces a lawsuit in the midst of an ongoing investigation into his work:

Retraction for “A genomic approach to colon cancer risk stratification yields biologic insights into therapeutic opportunities,” by Katherine S. Garman, Chaitanya R. Acharya, Elena Edelman, Marian Grade, Jochen Gaedcke, Shivani Sud, William Barry, Anna Mae Diehl, Dawn Provenzale, Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, B. Michael Ghadimi, Thomas Ried, Joseph R. Nevins, Sayan Mukherjee, David Hsu, and Anil Potti, which appeared in issue 49, December 9, 2008, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (105:19432–19437; first published December 2, 2008; 10.1073/pnas.0806674105).

The authors wish to note the following: “We wish to retract this article because we have been unable to reproduce certain key experiments described in the paper regarding validation and use of the colon cancer prognostic signature. This includes the validation performed with dataset E-MEXP-1224, as reported in Fig. 2A, as well as the generation of prognostic scores for colon cancer cell lines, as reported in Fig. 4. Because these results are fundamental to the conclusions of the paper, the authors formally retract the paper. We deeply regret the impact of this action on the work of other investigators.”

The 2008 paper, which has been cited 27 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, was already the subject of a minor 2009 correction: Continue reading New in PNAS: Potti retraction number seven, and a Potti correction

Why didn’t XMRV-chronic fatigue syndrome researcher Mikovits — now fired — share data with Science?

The saga of XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) continues, with the news that Judy Mikovits, a main proponent of the link between the virus and CFS, has been fired from her post at the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno. From a blog post yesterday on X Rx:

Breaking news. The entire WPI research program has been closed by the institute’s CEO, and the facility is now locked down. It’s former principle investigator, Dr. Judy Mikovits, is in active discussions concerning institutions to which she may move to continue her grant-funded research.

We spoke to Mikovits last week, apparently within a day of her being fired, according to the sequence of events reported today on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog. We were interested in her reaction to a comment to Retraction Watch by Science executive editor Monica Bradford about why the 2009 study Mikovits had co-authored had been partially retracted — a rare move, as we noted: Continue reading Why didn’t XMRV-chronic fatigue syndrome researcher Mikovits — now fired — share data with Science?

Authors retract chemistry paper after failing to get company’s permission to publish

Two chemists who published a paper earlier this year in Bioconjugate Chemistry have withdrawn it, after their company, Life Technologies, let them know they didn’t have permission to submit the work. The retraction notice reads:

Facile Synthesis of Symmetric, Monofunctional Cyanine Dyes for Imaging Applications, by Lai-Qiang Ying and Bruce P. Branchaud, Bioconjugate Chem., 2011, 22 (5), pp 865–869, DOI: 10.1021/bc2001006, has been retracted at the request of the authors and Life Technologies. The article was submitted for publication without the approval of Life Technologies.

Where the paper had appeared previously — it’s been completely removed from the journal’s site, as opposed to being marked as “withdrawn” or “retracted” — this is all that’s left: Continue reading Authors retract chemistry paper after failing to get company’s permission to publish

Physics paper in Science retracted after Vanderbilt facility closes

If the facility you need to reproduce your experiments closes after you’ve discovered questions about your original findings, what do you do?

If you’re a group of physicists that published a 2006 paper in Science, “Desorption of H from Si(111) by Resonant Excitation of the Si-H Vibrational Stretch Mode,” you retract your study. Here’s the notice, from today’s Science: Continue reading Physics paper in Science retracted after Vanderbilt facility closes

Why did Science partially retract the XMRV-chronic fatigue syndrome paper?

If past experience is any indication, billions of pixels will be spilled in the coming days as scientists and advocates debate the latest twist in the story of XMRV, or xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Today’s news is that Science is partially retracting a 2009 paper by Judy Mikovits and colleagues, including Vincent Lombardi, purporting to show a link between the virus and the syndrome — a paper about which they issued an Expression of Concern in May. The retraction is of a table and a figure — more on that in a bit.

In an excellent blow-by-blow account in Science of the nearly 20-year-long saga, also out today, Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink review the unusual circumstances of that Expression of Concern. Science editor-in-chief Bruce

Alberts and Science Executive Editor Monica Bradford had first suggested that Mikovits and her co-authors retract the paper voluntarily. “Science feels it would be in the best interest of the scientific community,” they wrote in a 26 May letter. Mikovits was livid and questioned Alberts’s motives. “Who wrote that letter? I don’t think it was Science,” she says. The co-authors thought the retraction request was premature, too. “What if we walk away from this based on contamination and it’s not contamination?” Lombardi asked. “You’ve got to give us time to figure this out.”

Alberts stresses that they floated the retraction idea because Science already planned to publish the Expression of Concern. “It wasn’t a public call for retraction,” he notes, emphasizing that the recipients shared it with the media. He also does not think it would have been premature, although he says it’s often a tough call whether to retract a paper. “Ultimately, it requires expert judgment and a lot of sensitivity to the issues,” he says. “We had lost confidence in the results.”

As Science noted in May, two studies accompanied the May Expression of Concern Continue reading Why did Science partially retract the XMRV-chronic fatigue syndrome paper?