A group of physicists has retracted their preliminary report in the GCN Circular of a massive star-sized explosion after deciding that what they’d really observed was another phenomenon.
Although we could try to explain this, we’d rather leave it up to Giacomo Vianello, an experimental physicist at Stanford University, who was a member of the research team.
Vianello told us: Continue reading Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder where you went: Astronomy report retracted
Pfizer has retracted another study involving an experimental cancer drug that later failed later-stage trials.
The study, published in Clinical Cancer Research in 2010, looked at which patients might respond to the drug, called figitumumab. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Pfizer retracts another experimental cancer drug study
Oncology Reviews has retracted a 2014 paper on breast cancer after learning that the authors lifted parts of it from a continuing medical education lesson on Medscape.
The paper, “Challenges of combined everolimus/endocrine therapy in hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer,” was written by Yousif Abubakr, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and Yasar Albushra, of King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, in Saudi Arabia.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Authors plagiarize CME cancer article, lose their review paper
The authors of a Current Biology paper published online in February of this year have retracted it after voluminous criticism on post-publication review site PubPeer and a university committee found evidence of figure manipulation.
The paper, “Agonist-Induced GPCR Shedding from the Ciliary Surface Is Dependent on ESCRT-III and VPS4,” was co-authored by Hua Jin and Livana Soetedjo, a graduate student in Jin’s lab. Soetedjo was first author, and Jin was corresponding author.
The comments at PubPeer began on March 24: Continue reading Authors retract Current Biology study following criticism on PubPeer and university investigation
We recently came across a paper in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, an Elsevier title, that had been temporarily removed without explanation. While we see a fair number of such opaque notices from Elsevier — and have written about why we think they’re a bad idea — we took interest in this one because the last author, Toren Finkel of the NIH, was the corresponding author of a Nature paper retracted earlier this year. (He also had two corrections on one Science paper, both of which are paywalled.)
What we learned suggests the withdrawal was completely unrelated to the Nature retraction, but also reveals a journal editor’s exasperation.
A group at the University of Texas Southwestern led by Adi F. Gazdar that found evidence of inappropriate image manipulation in a number of their papers has retracted its seventh and eighth studies.
Here’s the notice for 2005’s “Aberrant methylation profile of human malignant mesotheliomas and its relationship to SV40 infection,” in Oncogene: Continue reading UT-Southwestern cancer researchers up to 8 retractions
This one’s a little circular: The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, a SAGE journal, has retracted an author’s response to a letter to the editor that was never published. The original paper, “Intravenous sodium bicarbonate therapy in severely acidotic diabetic ketoacidosis,” is unaffected by the retraction.
According to the notice: Continue reading Drug journal jumps the gun on publishing response to comment
A pair of University of Utah researchers who both left their posts last year following an investigation into problems with their work have had another paper retracted from Cell Metabolism.
The investigation found “reckless disregard” in papers in which Ivana De Domenico was first author. She left the university at the end of June 2013, and and her lab head, Jerry Kaplan, retired at the same time.
Here’s the notice for 2008’s “The Hepcidin-Binding Site on Ferroportin Is Evolutionarily Conserved:” Continue reading Former University of Utah researchers, one guilty of “reckless disregard,” have another paper retracted
Bharat Aggarwal, the MD Anderson researcher who has threatened to sue Retraction Watch for writing about issues in his papers, has corrected another study.
Here’s the notice for “Induction of Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis by the Proteasome Inhibitor PS-341 in Hodgkin Disease Cell Lines Is Independent of Inhibitor of Nuclear Factor-κB Mutations or Activation of the CD30, CD40, and RANK Receptors:” Continue reading Cancer researcher who threatened to sue Retraction Watch corrects another paper
The following post was written by a former research fellow in the lab of Piero Anversa to whom we’ve promised confidentiality. Anversa has previously told us that he cannot comment because of an ongoing investigation.
Regular readers of Retraction Watch will note the recent news regarding the work conducted in the laboratory of Piero Anversa at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. In the early 2000s, his laboratory published a series of papers regarding the regenerative qualities of bone marrow-derived and cardiac-resident “stem cells.”
Those initial findings, as well as the research conducted since those early studies, have always been surrounded by controversy, as many have been unsuccessful in efforts to replicate their results. Controversy among competitors is not uncommon in our profession, but this particular one has blossomed into a formal investigation of their findings, and has, to date, led to the retraction of one paper and an expression of concern about another. Continue reading Braggadacio, information control, and fear: Life inside a Brigham stem cell lab under investigation