Tamsin Edwards was stunned. And hurt.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 5, Edwards had just learned that her blog, “All Models Are Wrong,” had disappeared from the PLOS Blogs Network, where it was hosted. No warning. No communication from PLOS.
So Edwards, a climate scientist at King’s College, London, tweeted: Continue reading With a badly handled tweet, PLOS angers scientists after a blog disappears
The Journal of Clinical Investigation has retracted a 2011 paper involving researchers at the National Institutes of Health after the NIH concluded that some of the data were wonky.
But the retraction notice reads like a Congressional roll call, with ayes, nays and even — in something we don’t believe we’ve seen before — an abstention. Continue reading Bartleby the author: Did you know you could abstain from a retraction notice?
JAMA Oncology has retracted a 2018 paper by a group from Sweden and the UK after the researchers discovered critical errors in their analysis that significantly altered the conclusions of the study.
The paper, “Risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma after antireflux surgery in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease in the Nordic countries,” purported to find that Continue reading Scientific integrity “a rare commodity these days:” Cancer journal makes its first retraction
A researcher at Kyoto University in Japan faked some of the data in a 2017 paper in Science about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake, the university said.
According to media reports about a press conference held today, Kyoto found that the paper’s first author, Aiming Lin, had committed misconduct, including falsification of data and plagiarism. They recommended that Lin retract the paper, and said he would face sanctions, while his co-authors were cleared of wrongdoing.
Science editor in chief Jeremy Berg tells us: Continue reading Science standing by for updates as university finds fraud in earthquake paper
Researchers have lost a 2018 conference abstract on screening for sickle cell disease in Africa over a dispute over authorship and the lack of appropriate disclosures.
The article, “Implementation of a sickle cell disease screening initiative in Uganda with HemoTypeSC(TM),” which was presented at a 2018 conference and then appeared in Blood, described a much-touted new blood test for sickle cell trait from a company in California called Silver Lake Research.
But according to the retraction notice, a noted public health researcher in Uganda said his name had appeared on the abstract without his permission: Continue reading Sickle cell screening abstract retracted for host of reasons, including an ambivalent co-author
We have news of two upcoming retractions, both following critiques on PubPeer.
PLOS ONE is retracting a 2012 paper by researchers at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome and the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, “Interferon-β Induces Cellular Senescence in Cutaneous Human Papilloma Virus-Transformed Human Keratinocytes by Affecting p53 Transactivating Activity.”
PubPeer commenters first left critiques of the paper on August 6 of last year, noting likely splicing and other manipulation of images. Several days later, pseudonymous whistleblower Claire Francis contacted the journal to flag similar issues. On Wednesday of this week, a journal representative emailed Francis to say the paper would be retracted: Continue reading “All very painful:” Two retractions to watch for, in eLife and PLOS ONE
Molecular Vision appears to have been flying blind when it retracted a 2013 paper by Rajendra Kadam and colleagues.
In December 2018, Kadam, a former “golden boy” in pharmaceutical research at the University of Colorado, Denver, was the subject of a finding from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which stated that he had fabricated his data. As part of the agreement, Kadam agreed to retract a paper in Molecular Vision. .
Kadam, who in 2016 had his doctoral degree revoked by UC Denver, two years after the university completed an investigation and sent its finding to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), now has eight retractions, two expressions of concern and a correction. Seven of them mention fabrication of data. But Molecular Vision, the most recent addition to the list, does not.
The paper was titled “Suprachoroidal delivery in a rabbit ex vivo eye model: influence of drug properties, regional differences in delivery, and comparison with intravitreal and intracameral routes.” Its retraction notice, issued February 18, states: Continue reading Eyes wide shut at vision journal as retraction notice misses the point
After years of back and forth, a highly cited paper that appeared to show that gay people who live in areas where people were highly prejudiced against them had a significantly shorter life expectancy has been retracted.
The paper, “Structural stigma and all-cause mortality in sexual minority populations,” was published in 2014 by Mark Hatzenbuehler of Columbia University and colleagues. As we reported last year, Mark Regnerus, of the University of Texas at Austin, published a paper describing his failed attempts to replicate the study in 2016: Continue reading Study claiming hate cuts 12 years off gay lives retracted
Imagine you’re a journal editor. A group of authors sends you a request to retract one of their papers, saying that “during figure assembly certain images were inappropriately processed.”
What do you do next? Do you ask some tough questions about just what “inappropriately processed” means? Do you check your files for whether the author’s institution had told you about an investigation into the work? Do you Google the author’s names? Do you…search Retraction Watch?
It seems unlikely that any of those things happened in the case of a recent retraction from Nature Communications, or, if they did, they don’t seem to have informed the notice. We don’t know for sure, because, as is typical, the journal isn’t saying much. But here’s what we do know. Continue reading Why journal editors should dig deeper when authors ask for a retraction
One of the most highly-cited journals in cardiology has retracted a paper less than a month after publishing it in response to criticism first posted on Twitter.
The article, “Short-term and long-term effects of a loading dose of atorvastatin before percutaneous coronary intervention on major adverse cardiovascular events in patients with acute coronary syndrome: a meta-analysis of 13 randomized controlled trials,” was published online January 3 in the European Heart Journal (EHJ). Its authors purported to analyze clinical trials of patients who were given a loading dose of atorvastatin, a cholesterol medication, before undergoing cardiac catheterization.
How closely the study authors adhered to their own methods came under question on January 8, when Ricky Turgeon, a cardiology pharmacist, posted a series of tweets in which he claimed some of the studies included in the analysis either did not test the drug in patients undergoing the procedure — referred to as PCI — or patients had not all been diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome, commonly known as a heart attack. With many of the trials included in the analysis not abiding by the predefined inclusion criteria, the study’s conclusions are unreliable, argued Turgeon. Continue reading Should journals credit eagle-eyed readers by name in retraction notices?