Category: bmc research notes

Study on pregnant women with HIV lied about having ethics approval

Screen Shot 2016-04-12 at 5.47.50 AMWe recently discovered a relatively old retraction notice — from 2014 — of a study on pregnant women with HIV.

The paper was retracted two years ago when BMC Research Notes discovered the authors falsely claimed they had obtained ethics approval from an institution in Kenya.

The study looked at the effectiveness of an antiretroviral therapy in 50 women who were receiving care at a center in Nairobi, Kenya. But the authors did not have permission from the center to use data from the women, nor the necessary ethics approval from Moi University to carry out the work.

Here’s the retraction note for “Effectiveness of option B highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) in pregnant HIV women:”

Continue reading Study on pregnant women with HIV lied about having ethics approval

Some retractions take three years to show up on PubMed: Study

bmcresnotesRetraction Watch readers may have noticed that we often cover retractions long before they appear in PubMed, the gold standard database for the life sciences literature. (In fact, we’ve taken to leaving comments on papers in PubMed Commons about retractions that haven’t been linked to their original abstracts yet.)

This can be an issue, because so many scientists use PubMed to find relevant literature. It may even contribute to the well-documented phenomenon of researchers citing retracted papers as if they hadn’t been retracted.

Until now, no one had quantified the time lag. In a new study, Evelynne Decullier, Laure Huot, and Hervé Maisonneuve — who have published on retractions before — looked at 237 retractions published in 2008. Their findings? Continue reading Some retractions take three years to show up on PubMed: Study

Dispute over data rights forces retraction of obesity paper

bmcresnotesA group of researchers in South Africa has lost their 2012 article in BMC Research Notes after one of the author’s institutions evidently pulled rank and sought to claim the data as its own.

The article, “Association of body weight and physical activity with blood pressure in a rural population in the Dikgale village of Limpopo Province in South Africa,” appeared last February. Its first author was Seth Mkhonto, who listed two affiliations, the Human Sciences Research Council, in Pretoria, and the University of the Limpopo.

But the latter institution seems not to have given Mkhonto approval to publish the data — a rather strange state of affairs given the whole “publish or perish” ethos of academia.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Dispute over data rights forces retraction of obesity paper

When 1 equals 2, the result is a retraction

bmcrnA group of psychiatric researchers in Norway has lost their 2013 paper in BMC Research Notes on the effects of antipsychotic medications on the brain after discovering that they’d botched their imaging analyses.

The article, “Does changing from a first generation antipsychotic (perphenazin) to a second generation antipsychotic (risperidone) alter brain activation and motor activity? A case report,” came from a trio of scientists at the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital, also in Bergen. According to the abstract of the paper, which was published last May:

Continue reading When 1 equals 2, the result is a retraction

Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper

Caution: Sexual innuendo ahead.

The withdrawal method is a notoriously unreliable form of birth control. It seems that what happens between the sheets applies to paper as well as cotton.

Here’s a retraction notice from BMC Research Notes that speaks — and nudges and winks — for itself. The 2011 article, “Effect of controlled and uncontrolled cooling rate on motility parameters of cryopreserved ram spermatozoa,” by a team of Irani veterinary scientists: Continue reading Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper