Category: by journal

Duplicate publication uprooted from plant journal

AJPS2015012714522401The American Journal of Plant Sciences has retracted a duplicate publication — and is considerately describing what happened in a checklist that accompanies the retraction note.

The checklist is similar to one that friend of Retraction Watch Hervé Maisonneuve has proposed to the Committee on Publication Ethics.

The retracted paper shares one author with the paper that it duplicated from: Irfan Talib, whose affiliation is listed on the retracted paper as the University of Agriculture in Pakistan.

Here are the relevant fields on the checklist for “Study of Genetic Diversity in Germplasm of Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) in Pakistan” (a PDF on this page includes the checklist and the original paper):

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Retracted anesthesia study “was not conducted in reality”

coverWe’ve come across a new way to say the data in a paper are not reliable:

It has been found that the study represented in the article was not conducted in reality.

That’s from the retraction note for a paper that Anesthesia Essays and Researches has retracted for data falsification. The rest of the retraction note for “Intrathecal dextmedetomidine to reduce shoulder tip pain in laparoscopic cholecystectomies under spinal anesthesia” explains:

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Sperm paper impaired by “corporate company” analysis

2.coverWithout a certain protein, mouse sperm have motility disorders. That’s the conclusion of a paper that has itself been stopped — by errors in the data analysis, carried out by a third-party company.

The retraction note pins the analysis, which led to faulty data, on a “corporate company.” Aside from the companies that sell the kits used for substrates, assays, and detection, there’s only one company mentioned in the paper:

Generation of the mouse model was performed by the Cyagen Company (Guangzhou, China)

However, a representative of Cyagen says it does not offer the type of analysis described by the retraction note.

Here’s the full retraction note for the 2015 paper in Biology of Reproduction (which is paywalled — tsk, tsk):
Continue reading Sperm paper impaired by “corporate company” analysis

Mistaken plagiarism? Journal retracts education paper that inadvertently included others’ work

An education journal is pulling a 2014 paper about how US funding partnerships in Africa could alleviate local poverty, after the author admitted to mistakenly lifting sentences from work presented at a 2012 conference.

Author Christopher S. Collins at Azusa Pacific University took full responsibility for the plagiarism, and told us he suggested the journal retract the paper — but also proposed alternatives, such as adding the plagiarized author as a co-author, or publishing “an error sheet” that cites the material in the sentences in question.

If it’s hard to imagine how someone could plagiarize another researcher’s work by mistake, Collins explained what happened in a 900-word statement, in which he also told us how he is moving forward professionally and personally.

Here’s how some plagiarized sentences ended up in “Can funding for university partnerships between Africa and the US contribute to social development and poverty reduction?” in Higher Education, according to Collins:

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Fake email address — for author, not reviewer — fells another paper

Screen Shot 2016-02-22 at 10.19.43 AMWe’ve seen many cases of researchers creating fake email addresses to impersonate reviewers that usher their paper to publication.

But in the latest fake email incident, a journal is retracting a paper on liver cancer after the first author created a phony address for the last and corresponding author. Both are researchers at Zhengzhou University in China.

This isn’t the first time that an author has worked around the corresponding author: there’s a case from a few years ago in which the corresponding author didn’t know that the paper was being published at all. Recently, we also wrote about a doctor who was suspended in the UK after submitting papers without her co-authors’ knowledge, including creating a fake email for one of them.

This latest paper had another problem, too: plagiarism. Here’s the retraction note for “The influence of TLR4 agonist lipopolysaccharides on hepatocellular carcinoma cells and the feasibility of its application in treating liver cancer,” published in OncoTargets and Therapy:

Continue reading Fake email address — for author, not reviewer — fells another paper

Authorship, funding misstatements force retraction of satellite study

rslRemote Sensing Letters has retracted a 2015 paper by a pair of researchers in China because the duo was in fact a solo, and the manuscript lied about its funding source.

The article, “A novel method of feature extraction and fusion and its application in satellite images classification,” purportedly was written by Da Lin and Xin Xu, of Wuhan University. But as the retraction notice makes clear, that wasn’t the case: Continue reading Authorship, funding misstatements force retraction of satellite study

Shigeaki Kato up to 38 retractions

Shigeaki Kato
Shigeaki Kato

Our retraction notice count for Shigeaki Kato, number seven on our leaderboard, has grown to 38.

The former University of Tokyo endocrinologist recently earned another retraction, for a paper in Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics that contained image manipulation. As we’ve noted before, Kato resigned from the university in 2012 as it investigated his work for misconduct; in 2013 a Japanese newspaper reported that the investigation had found 43 papers from his lab contained “likely altered or forged materials.”

In addition to the new retraction, we’ve dug up four others for Kato from the past few years, plus one correction. Two of the retraction notices mention an investigation at the University of Tokyo.

First, the retraction note for “Multiple co-activator complexes support ligand-induced transactivation function of VDR,” published in December:

Continue reading Shigeaki Kato up to 38 retractions

NEJM corrects 3 papers after prominent cancer scientist left off credit for breakthrough

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 12.04.43 PMThe New England Journal of Medicine has corrected three highly cited papers to credit researchers who played a role in the work.

The papers describe a treatment in which engineered T cells fight leukemia, originally hailed as a “major advance” in the New York Times. Since the first paper appeared in 2011, co-author Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania has received more than $7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to MIT Technology Review. But according to a newly published correction, the three NEJM papers failed to note in the acknowledgement section that an important component of the experiments was supplied by researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The correction, made 11 months after a request from co-author and Penn researcher David Porter, explains the contribution of the St Jude’s researchers:

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Another paper by GM researcher pulled over manipulation concerns

Screen Shot 2016-03-14 at 11.52.18 AMA researcher who published findings questioning the safety of genetically modified organisms has lost a second paper following concerns of image manipulation.

Last week, the journal animal retracted a 2010 paper by Federico Infascelli, an animal nutrition researcher at the University of Naples, which claimed to find modified genes in the milk and blood of goats who were fed genetically modified soybeans. The retraction stems from an investigation that concluded the authors likely manipulated images, according to the note. Earlier this year, another journal retracted one of Infascelli’s papers that contained a duplicated figure.

In February, Italian paper La Repubblica (which we read with Google Translate) reported that the university found problems in three of his articles and issued a warning.

Here’s the retraction note for “Fate of transgenic DNA and evaluation of metabolic effects in goats fed genetically modified soybean and in their offsprings:”

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“I am really sorry:” Peer reviewer stole text for own paper

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We’re sharing a relatively old retraction notice with you today, because it’s of a nature we don’t often see: A chemist apparently stole text from a manuscript he was reviewing.

In spring of 2009, Yi-Chou Tsai, a chemist at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, was reviewing a paper for Nature Chemistry. At the time, he’d asked a colleague to write a review article with him, so forwarded him the Nature Chemistry manuscript for reference. But some of that text ended up in their review paper,”Recent Progress in the Chemistry of Quintuple Bonds,” published in Chemistry Letters. 

Both papers were published in 2009; Chemistry Letters retracted the review the next year.

The retraction includes a statement from Tsai, who puts the blame on his co-author, Chih-Chieh Chang, also listed as affiliated with NTHU (we couldn’t find a webpage for him):

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