Category: hepatology

Author objects to retraction after he says journal ignored his queries for three years

In 2014, a journal contacted researcher Denis Rousseau about one of his papers that had just been published online ahead of print, raising some concerns. According to Rousseau, he sent the journal a corrected figure “almost immediately,” which he believed addressed the issue.

Rousseau, a cell biologist at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France, said he then contacted the journal many times over the next three years to ask about the status of the paper — which never ended up in print — but heard nothing back.

Three years passed.

In March, the publisher finally contacted Rousseau, this time to ask him to issue a formal retraction for the paper. And despite his objections, Molecular and Cellular Biology published a sparse retraction notice, which provides little information about what went wrong:

Continue reading Author objects to retraction after he says journal ignored his queries for three years

Stem cell researchers fix two papers following PubPeer comments

Screen Shot 2016-04-13 at 5.56.09 PMA pair of stem cell researchers have earned two corrections, the result of images that were mislabeled, distorted, or compiled incorrectly, according to the notices.

Kang Cheng prepared the gels when he was a research fellow in last author Sanjeev Gupta‘s lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Gupta told us he reviewed the original gels, and the errors didn’t affect the conclusions in the papers, which were reproducible. He noted he believes the problems are the result of honest mistakes:

The errors did not confer any benefits whatsoever either for the papers or for Dr. Cheng.

On PubPeer, commenters have raised questions about the now corrected papers — along with several others on which Gupta is the senior author, but Cheng is not a co-author.

Edward Burns, research integrity officer at Einstein, told us that the medical school looked into an allegation of misconduct against Gupta:  

Continue reading Stem cell researchers fix two papers following PubPeer comments

“Insufficient permission” from funder resects liver disease paper

HepatologyA study on chronic liver inflammation was pulled from the journal Hepatology because of “insufficient permission by the authors’ funding institution to submit and publish the manuscript.” 

The paper, which was published in July, looked into how steatosis, the abnormal retention of fat in the liver, turns into steatohepatitis, also known as fatty liver disease. Researchers found that Treg cells play a central role in controlling the disease.

Unfortunately, the journal’s managing editor didn’t provide any information about the nature of the permission problems, and the notice doesn’t give any details.

Here it is, in full:

Continue reading “Insufficient permission” from funder resects liver disease paper

Hepatology issues corrections in two papers from Pitt liver group

hepatology A group of liver researchers from the University of Pittsburgh has earned a pair of corrections in Hepatology for image problems.

The team was led by George K. Michalopoulos, chair of the department of pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

One article, “Excessive hepatomegaly of mice with hepatocyte-targeted elimination of integrin linked kinase following treatment with 1,4-bis [2-(3,5-dichaloropyridyloxy)] benzene,” appeared in January 2011. According to the notice: Continue reading Hepatology issues corrections in two papers from Pitt liver group

Former NIH scientist falsified images in hepatitis study: ORI

Baoyan Xu, via NIH
Baoyan Xu, via NIH

A former postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) committed misconduct in a study of hepatitis by falsely claiming that data from a single trial subject were actually from more than a dozen different people, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found.

The investigation was prompted by allegations made by readers of the paper. Baoyan Xu made what the ORI called “a limited admission” that “some better looking strips were repeatedly used as representatives for several times [sic].”

According to a report of the ORI’s findings to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, the paper, “Hybrid DNA virus in Chinese patients with seronegative hepatitis discovered by deep sequencing, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Continue reading Former NIH scientist falsified images in hepatitis study: ORI

Liver study a twin, gets retracted

B_SPR570_HIJO Journal.inddThe liver is the only internal organ that can regenerate. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Egyptian researchers tried to publish the same paper about liver ischemia twice  in different journals. They succeeded — for a little while, at least.

The Journal of Molecular Histology is retracting the second of the articles to appear. Titled “Effect of preischemic treatment with fenofibrate, a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-α ligand, on hepatic ischemia–reperfusion injury in rats,” (which is still available online) it was published in 2011 by Vivian Boshra and Amal M. Moustafa of Mansoura University.

Trouble was, in 2011 Moustafa and Boshra, in that order, had also published “Effect of fenofibrate on the experimentally induced hepatic ischemia/reperfusion injury in rats: biochemical, light, and electron microscopic studies” in the Egyptian Journal of Histology (link to pdf).

That, as we know, is not done.

As the retraction notice states: Continue reading Liver study a twin, gets retracted

Error scuppers paper on treatment for liver fibrosis

pharmbioPharmaceutical Biology has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of liver researchers from China after the discovery of an error that evidently invalidated the results in the paper.

The article, “Antifibrotic effects of protocatechuic aldehyde on experimental liver fibrosis,” purported to show that

protocatechuic aldehyde, the major degradation of phenolic acids … has potentially conferring antifibrogenic effects.

In other words, the compound appears to prevent the formation of liver fibroids.
But it doesn’t — at least, not according to the study — as the retraction notice explains: Continue reading Error scuppers paper on treatment for liver fibrosis

Group’s duplication retractions span the globe, from New Zealand to Romania to Croatia

The retraction count continues to grow for a group of Iranian scientists who appear to have published similar work four times.

The group was forced to retract a Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases paper in March. That retraction came alongside one in the New Zealand Journal of Medical Laboratory Science, whose editor had tipped JGLD editor Monica Acalovschi — who has taken a tough stance on duplication in her own journal, published in Romania — off to the duplication. Acalovschi, in turn, tipped off Biochemia Medica, the journal of Croatian Society of Medical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine, which has now retracted a 2009 paper by the group.

The Biochemia Medica retraction, published in its June 2012 issue, says: Continue reading Group’s duplication retractions span the globe, from New Zealand to Romania to Croatia

Plagiarism leads to retraction of liver cancer paper

The journal Digestion has a retraction notice that’s, well, an amusing morsel.

At issue was a 2011 paper on a biomarker for liver cancer by a group of Turkish authors who plagiarized from the work of others.

Here’s the notice for the article, titled “Diagnostic and Prognostic Validity of Golgi Protein 73 in Hepatocellular Carcinoma“: Continue reading Plagiarism leads to retraction of liver cancer paper

Crise de foie: Liver journals retract duplicate biomarker pubs

Two liver journals have retracted articles from a group of Irani researchers who published similar — but not quite identical — versions of the same paper some months apart.

A retraction notice in the Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases — which bills itself as the “Official Journal of the Romanian Societies of Gastroenterology” — explains what happened: Continue reading Crise de foie: Liver journals retract duplicate biomarker pubs