Bharat B. Aggarwal, the MD Anderson researcher under investigation at his institution over concerns of image manipulation, has withdrawn a second paper, although you’d never know why from the statement.
The notice for the article, “Evidence for the critical roles of NF-κB p65 and specificity proteins in the apoptosis-inducing activity of proteasome inhibitors in leukemia cells,” is pretty minimal: Continue reading Another withdrawal by MD Anderson’s Aggarwal, again for unclear reasons
The author of a controversial and now-retracted paper questioning the science of climate change has been reprimanded by his university for plagiarism. According to USA Today’s Dan Vergano, who broke the news:
[Edward] Wegman was the senior author of a 2006 report to Congress that criticized climate scientists as excessively collaborative, and found fault with a statistical technique used in two climate studies. Portions of the report analysis were published in the journal, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, in a 2008 study.
University of Massachusetts professor Raymond Bradley filed a complaint against Wegman in 2010, noting that portions of the report and the CSDA study appeared lifted from one of his textbooks and from other sources, including Wikipedia. CSDA later retracted the study, noting the plagiarism, last year.
Here’s the explicit retraction notice: Continue reading Climate science critic Wegman reprimanded by one university committee while another finds no misconduct
Alzheimer’s & Dementia has “temporarily withdrawn” a 2012 abstract, slated for publication next month, linking Alzheimer’s disease with exposure to dental x-rays.
The author is Caroline Rodgers, a self-described “independent writer/researcher who investigates public health issues and advocates for change.” Although we can’t find the text, we’re guessing that its premise is similar to that of her 2011 paper in Medical Hypotheses, titled “Dental X-ray exposure and Alzheimer’s disease: a hypothetical etiological association.”
Here’s the abstract from that paper: Continue reading Dental X-rays linked to Alzheimer’s disease? Abstract saying so temporarily withdrawn
A couple of engineers in Iran turn out to be better at predicting the “failure probability” of water pipes than of their chances of being published.
Consider this retraction notice for “Estimation of failure probability in water pipes network using statistical model,” originally published in February 2011 in Engineering Failure Analysis: Continue reading “Failure probability” turns out to be quite high as engineers double-submit paper, then see it retracted
The International Journal of Impact Engineering has a highly technical retraction of an article whose authors discovered that crucial findings relied on a model that was different from the one they reported using in a particular figure.
The article, “Dynamic behavior of polymers at high strain-rates based on split Hopkinson pressure bar tests,” was published online last November by a pair of researchers from the U.K. and China. As the notice states:
Continue reading Flawed model leads to retraction of polymer paper
Whether it’s a one-off or a sign of things to come, Bharat Aggarwal, the MD Anderson scientist at the center of a blogospheric storm—and an institutional investigation—over the validity of his data, has had a paper withdrawn by the journal Cancer Letters. Continue reading MD Anderson researcher Aggarwal loses paper in Cancer Letters
A dozen years might seem like a publishing eternity, but the European Journal of Cancer
has decided to purge a duplicate paper from 2000. The article, on the utility of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for detecting prostate cancer, comes from a group whose work in this area has been widely cited as evidence for the benefits of the highly controversial screening tool.
“Prostate cancer screening in the Tyrol, Austria: experience and results,” by a group of Austrian researchers, has a rather complicated past. It’s been cited 42 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the notice, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal: Continue reading Duplication forces retraction of paper by group whose work is used to justify prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing
The Journal of Clinical Anesthesia has retracted a paper by a group of Israeli authors whose study may not have had appropriate ethical approval — or even collected the reported data.
The article, “Accidental venous and dural puncture during epidural analgesia in obese parturients (BMI > 40 kg/m2): three different body positions during insertion,” was published in 2010 by a team from Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, in Zerifin, one of the country’s largest hospitals and an affiliate of Tel Aviv University. Dural puncture is an infrequent but potentially serious complication of labor anesthesia, causing severe headaches and, in rare cases, death if untreated.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Anesthesia journal editor says “if you blow us off, it will be retracted,” and sticks to his word
Safety science might not be the most crowded field, nor its eponymous journal the title on every marquee, but here’s a general rule for would-be plagiarists even in relatively obscure publications: Avoid lifting text from government reports and other publicly available references. (Well, don’t plagiarize at all, but you know what we mean.)
Consider: The journal Safety Science is retracting a 2011 paper whose authors evidently failed to adhere to that principle. Here’s the notice for the article, “Agent-based simulation of fire emergency evacuation with fire and human interaction model,” by Yang Peizhong, Wang Xin and Liu Tao, of Shanghai Jiaotong University: Continue reading Plagiarism burns authors of fire safety paper
The journal Cell has an interesting — and somewhat puzzling — correction this month that we’ll add to our “mega-correction” file.
At issue is a paper, published in October, from the lab of Harvard’s Stephen Elledge, a noted genetics researcher, whose first author is a post-doc there named Michael Emanuele.
According to the notice, Emanuele (singled out, we note) seems to have been rather careless with the images used in the article, titled “Global Identification of Modular Cullin-RING Ligase Substrates”: Continue reading Cell runs a lengthy correction, rather than retraction, for image problems