Category: nature retractions

The authors of a Nature paper that could have meant a great leap forward for Microsoft’s computing power are retracting it today after other researchers flagged serious problems in the work.

The researchers, led by Leo Kouwenhoven, a physicist at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who is also employed by Microsoft, published “Quantized Majorana conductance” on March 28, 2018. Along with work at other labs, the paper, which claimed to have found evidence for a long-elusive particle known as a Majorana fermion, prompted this quotation in a BBC story: 

Continue reading Authors retract Nature Majorana paper, apologize for “insufficient scientific rigour”

Nature has retracted a recent commentary after the author complained that he had been misled by the relationship of the publication to a financial sponsor and told to avoid critiquing work from the institution. The journal says it is revisiting its “editorial guidelines and processes” in the wake of the case. 

Kenneth Witwer, an RNA expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said he had been approached by Nature earlier this year to contribute a piece to one of the journal’s “Outlook” sections.  

Outlook sections are sponsored, and in this case, the supporter was Nanjing University in China. One of the institution’s deans and star researchers, Chen-Yu Zhang, had arranged the section and written an article for it as well — a piece Witwer described as essentially an advertorial for Zhang’s questionable research. [Springer Nature, in comments to Retraction Watch, said that “The Zhang piece is advertorial, is clearly labelled as such and uses a different typeface from editorial content to promote transparency.”]

According to Nature policy: 

Continue reading Author retracts Nature commentary over concerns about section’s sponsorship

A paper on a pocket-sized winged “dinosaur” is being retracted after new unpublished findings cast doubt on the authors’ characterizations of their discovery.

The study, “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar,” was published in Nature on March 11, 2020. Many news outlets, including the New York Times, Newsweek and National Geographic, picked up on the findings. 

Then on March 18, Zhiheng Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with co-authors, posted a comment on bioRxiv about the study, casting doubt on whether the amber-encased specimen was in fact a dinosaur or avian species.

Nature updated the study with an expression of concern on May 29, which said:

Continue reading A big Nature study on a tiny dinosaur is being retracted

Following five years of criticism, a group of researchers based at Stanford and elsewhere have retracted a 2006 paper in Nature for “image anomalies.” 

The notice for “Lysyl oxidase is essential for hypoxia-induced metastasis” reads:

Continue reading Nature paper on cancer retracted after years of scrutiny

The authors of a 2019 Nature paper on hydrology have retracted it after commenters pointed out a slew of errors with the work. 

The article, “Global analysis of streamflow response to forest management,” was written by Jaivime Evaristo, of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, in The Netherlands, and Jeffrey McDonnell, of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada. In it, Evaristo and McDonnell produced an estimate of the effects of deforestation on the volume of the world’s rivers. 

Their conclusion: “forest removal can lead to increases in streamflow that are around 3.4 times greater than the mean annual runoff of the Amazon River” — nearly enough to double the volume of all the world’s rivers in total.  

Disturbing (for those of us not in the field) thought experiment aside, the estimate turns out to be off the mark. 

The retraction notice states: 

Continue reading Authors retract Nature paper on dramatic increases in streamflow from deforestation

A major new report about the dramatic warming of the oceans cites a 2018 Nature paper on the topic that was retracted earlier this week — the same day, in fact, that the report dropped.

But one of the authors of that paper tells Retraction Watch that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, released September 25, must have meant to cite a different paper by the same authors. 

The report concluded that:

It is virtually certain that the global ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system (high confidence). Since 1993, the rate of ocean warming has more than doubled (likely).

In a section on global carbon burden, the document states that: 

Continue reading Did the IPCC’s new oceans report mean to cite a now-retracted paper?

Nature is retracting a 2018 paper which found that the oceans are warming much faster than predicted by previous models of climate change.

The article, “Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition,” appeared at last October but quickly drew the attention of an influential critic who said the analysis was flawed. 

The authors agreed, and within three weeks the paper received the following update: 

Continue reading Nature paper on ocean warming retracted

Nature is rescinding an award to a Spanish researcher whose group has at least nine retractions for problems with their published images. 

The journal in 2017 gave Carlos López-Otín, of the University of Oviedo, its mid-career achievement mentoring prize for Spanish scientists — along with a physicist from Barcelona — citing: 

the ability of these scientists to instil confidence in self-doubting trainees, and of their motivational skills. 

But two years – and a slew of retractions — later, it seems Nature’s own doubts about López-Otín’s skills as a mentor were too great to ignore.

Continue reading Nature walks back mentorship prize for Spanish scientist with nine retractions