A case of author’s remorse immediately after publication of her paper has the editor of the journal calling “bullshit” on the decision to retract the work.
Shortly after publication, the named first author, Antonia Phillip, contacted the journal to repudiate the paper. According to the retraction notice, dated January 14:
A paper that was the subject of a four-page correction in 2018, and which helped inform a now-halted clinical trial of a drug for lung cancer, has been retracted following an institutional investigation concluded that one of the researchers had falsified the data in that article and at least four others.
And we have learned that Springer Nature should be acting on a different article by the researcher shortly, and has just begun an investigation of yet another.
The PNAS article, which appeared in 2015, was written by Takashi Nojiri, formerly of Osaka University and the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute, in Japan. As we reported in June, an August 2020 report from National University Corporation Osaka University and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Hospital concluded that Nojiri committed:
A prominent astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin has withdrawn a preprint and a published paper after critics accused him of perpetuating inequality in the field, saying he is more sorry “than words can say” about the matter and that he is taking a hiatus from his work to allow the controversy to subside. He is also putting publication of a book he wrote on the subject on hold.
Kormendy published the work last week as a preprint on arXiv before it appeared in PNAS but after he’d received word from the journal that it had been accepted.
The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work.
The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming behaviors they ultimately attributed to a previously undetected neuroendocrine tumor called a pheochromocytoma.
According to the retraction notice, however, the tumor wasn’t the only thing about the paper that was hidden. The authors also misled the Lancet when they said they hadn’t published about the case when they submitted their writeup about the case — a fact unknown to the journal until this summer:
A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House’s climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year.
Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013 under President Obama, joined the White House in March of this year as Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been the retelling of the devastation wrought by an exploding asteroid in or around the year 1,650 BCE.
A group of researchers at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia have retracted a paper in Nature for data discrepancies and inconsistencies — as well as missing data. And one of the corresponding authors has left the institution, Retraction Watch has learned.
The authors of a 2020 case study of COVID-19 have retracted the work because they were “unsatisfied with the quality” of the work. Nor, judging from the retraction notice, should they — or the journal that published the report — be.
The article was titled “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection Mimicking as Pulmonary Tuberculosis in an Inmate” and was written by a group led by Hina Akbar, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, in Memphis. According to the abstract:
Here, we describe a case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a low prevalence area which was initially diagnosed and managed as pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in a high-risk inmate population. These ambiguous presentations can lead to mismanagement of such patients resulting in potentially fatal outcomes and public health crises in confined facilities. This also highlights the significance of a high index of clinical suspicion for SARS-CoV-2 especially in high risk and vulnerable populations.
That might be true, but evidently the article did a poor job of making the argument. The nostra culpa retraction notice states:
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has retracted a highly influential 2012 paper by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University whose work has been called into question over concerns about the data in some of his publications.
This post was updated at 1145 UTC on August 13, 2021. In the original post, we noted that Joseph Powell and Gibran Hemani had not responded to our request for comment, which we sent shortly after learning under embargo from Nature that this retraction would be published. However, Powell did respond, copying Hemani, as Powell noted in a Twitter thread, and the email never reached us. We have added Powell’s comments, and updated the first sentence of the post to reflect them. We are also investigating why Powell’s email never arrived. We apologize for the errors regardless of the cause, and appreciate the opportunity to update.
The authors of a 2014 research letter in Nature have retracted their article, with near but not entire unanimity, after “new work led to interpretation of the original results being no longer fully valid,” according to the senior author.
Titled “Detection and replication of epistasis influencing transcription in humans,” the letter was written by a group from Australia, Europe and the United States led by Gibran Hemani, then of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, and now of the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the paper was Joseph Powell, also then of Queensland but now at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in Darlinghurst, Australia. The paper has been cited 114 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
