Two sets of authors have withdrawn their papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry. We’re telling you about the both together because, true to JBC form, there’s not too much to say.
The retraction notices for both papers — about the molecular underpinnings of cardiac fibroblasts and melanoma cells — are identical:
Continue reading Authors withdraw two papers from JBC — and that’s all we know
A paper published in August that caught the media’s eye for concluding that feeling sad influences how you see colors has been retracted, after the authors identified problems that undermined their findings.
The authors explain the problems in a detailed retraction note released today by Psychological Science. They note that they found sadness influenced how people see blues and yellows but not reds and greens, but they needed to compare those findings to each other in order to prove the validity of the conclusion. And once they performed that additional test, the conclusion no longer held up.
In the retraction note for “Sadness impairs color perception,” the editor reinforces that there was no foul play:
A journal has issued a rather large correction — what we call “mega-correction” — to a 2014 paper on a gastric cancer biomarker that fixes problems with several of the study’s figures.
The authors write that despite the corrections, “the results and conclusions put forth in the article remain unchanged.”
The paper, “TMEFF2 Deregulation Contributes to Gastric Carcinogenesis and Indicates Poor Survival Outcome” explored the role of TMEFF2 in gastric cancer. The researchers found that the protein acts as a tumor suppressor, and low levels can indicate the presence of cancerous cells.
Here’s the full correction notice, published by Clinical Cancer Research in August:
Continue reading Mega-correction to several images in gastric cancer study
An environmental journal has pulled a 2011 paper following an investigation, which revealed it contained “extensive similarities” with another paper published two years earlier by some of the same authors.
Two of the authors of the newly retracted paper — Zulfiqar Ahmad from Quaid-i-Azam University and Arshad Ashraf of the National Agricultural Research Center, both in Islamabad, Pakistan — were the sole authors of a 2008 paper about modeling groundwater flow in Indus Basin, Pakistan. The 2011 paper — posted online in 2010 — focused on the same topic, but included two additional authors, one of whom told us he was unaware of the previous paper and agrees with the journal’s decision. Ahmad, however, has defended the 2011 paper and asked that the journal remove the retraction note.
Here’s the note, published in April by Environmental Monitoring and Assessment: Continue reading Authors object to duplication verdict by environmental journal
An investigation at the University of Illinois at Chicago has found “a preponderance of evidence” that a psychiatrist who has received millions of dollars in federal funding has committed misconduct.
One paper co-authored by Mani Pavuluri, the director of the Pediatric Mood Disorders Program, has been officially retracted so far, from the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience. UIC has requested that two others be retracted as well. None of the child participants in the three papers received medication as part of the research, but the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience paper was pulled after the investigation found that Pavuluri had misrepresented how much medication some children had taken outside of the study.
On Tuesday, after we’d learned of the first retraction, Pavuluri told Retraction Watch that she didn’t “want mountains made out of molehills,” but admitted to “a bit of an [Institutional Review Board] infraction.”
The retraction note from the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience lays the blame squarely on Pavuluri’s shoulders:
Continue reading University finds “preponderance of evidence” of misconduct by child psychiatrist
A disability journal is “paying significant attention” to papers authored by Anna Stubblefield, a former Rutgers researcher recently convicted of sexually assaulting a disabled man who participated in her research.
Stubblefield was convicted of sexually assaulting “DJ,” a man in his thirties with cerebral palsy who was “declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler,” according to a lengthy piece in the New York Times. Stubblefield and DJ published papers in Disability Studies Quarterly; in one, Stubblefield describes a controversial technique which she claimed helped DJ communicate. But when she eventually used the technique to say DJ was in love with her, his family took her to court, and she was convicted of aggravated sexual assault.
Here is the note from Disability Studies Quarterly, which was published this morning: Continue reading Journal reviewing papers by researcher who sexually assaulted disabled author
An open-access journal with a speedy peer review process has been having some issues with a retracted article on the biology of sex addiction.
Here’s the simple timeline of events: “Hypersexuality Addiction and Withdrawal: Phenomenology, Neurogenetics and Epigenetics,” a review article, was published by Cureus in July, following a two-day peer review. In the weeks that followed, the paper received a number of criticisms. So the journal quietly corrected it, then issued a formal correction, then retracted the paper — and now, finally, has republished it. The editor of the journal, Stanford professor emeritus John Adler, admitted the “decision was dumb” to initially fix the article without an alert, but it was ultimately doomed by “political” issues — namely, a larger debate over whether or not “sex addiction” exists at all.
We’ll start with the retraction. According to the note, it stems from the mistaken characterization of how sex addition — “hypersexuality” — is described in the current “bible” of psychiatry:
Continue reading Sex addiction article retracted, republished
Authors have retracted a highly cited Nature letter that purported to discover a much sought-after, stable light source from quantum dots, after they realized the light was actually coming from another source: the glass the dots were affixed to.
When the paper “Non-blinking semiconductor nanocrystals” was published in 2009, it received some media coverage, such as in Chemistry World. That’s partly because very small sources of “non-blinking” light could have wide-ranging, big-picture applications, author Todd Krauss, a physical chemist at the University of Rochester, told us:
Off the top of my head, a quantum computer. Quantum cryptography is another one. People want a stable light source that obeys quantum physics, instead of classic physics.
The retraction note, published Wednesday, explains how the researchers found out the effect was coming from the glass, not quantum dots:
Continue reading Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error
The American Journal of Public Health has retracted a paper after it was published online, when editors discovered that the author had plagiarized text verbatim and attributed the material to completely different sources.
“Child Farm Laborers” discusses child labor through the lens of the American photographers that documented the lives of young farm workers at the beginning of the century, such as Lewis Hine. It was authored Aung Zaw Win, whose affiliation on the paper is listed as Notre Dame de Namur University, in California.
The article was slated to be published in the journal’s August issue but editors printed the retraction shortly after it posted online. Here’s the notice:
Continue reading Retracted child labor paper “was improperly attributed,” copied text verbatim
JAMA Psychiatry has retracted and republished a paper on a cutting-edge procedure for patients with obsessive compulsive disorder.
In the original paper, the authors claimed that three out of eight patients who underwent a procedure that used gamma rays to kill brain cells showed improvements 12 months later (versus zero in the group who underwent a “sham” procedure). But after a reader noticed an “inadvertent” error in the calculation of how many patients had improved, the authors realized that only two of the patients had responded meaningfully to the procedure.
The new results “did not reach statistical significance,” the authors write in a “Notice of Retraction and Replacement.” JAMA Psychiatry published it yesterday, along with a new version of the article, a letter from psychiatrist Christopher Baethge pointing out the error, and an editorial. The original article is available in the supplemental material of the new version, with the errors highlighted.
Here’s the note in full for “Gamma ventral capsulotomy for obsessive-compulsive disorder: a randomized clinical trial,” which explains the error:
Continue reading Journal retracts — and republishes — small study on gamma rays for OCD