Category: by journal

Retraction appears for faked study of Novartis anti-cancer compound

Raymond Sawaya, director of MD Anderson’s brain tumor program, presents Jun Fu with the 2014 Caroline Ross Endowment Fellowship.
Raymond Sawaya, director of MD Anderson’s brain tumor program, presents Jun Fu with the 2014 Caroline Ross Endowment Fellowship.

A paper by a former postdoc at MD Anderson Cancer Center who “admitted to knowingly and intentionally falsifying” a figure has been retracted.

In August, the Office of Research Integrity announced that it had sanctioned Jun Fu for faking data in a study of the results of a mouse study of NVP-HSP990, a Novartis compound designed to fight brain tumors. Here’s the notice for the study in question, published in Cancer Research:
Continue reading Retraction appears for faked study of Novartis anti-cancer compound

Paper on circulating tumor cells taken out of circulation after lab error

medical oncologyA group of researchers at the Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences in Guangzhou, China have retracted a paper that came out of a clinical trial on transarterial chemoembolization, a targeted kind of chemotherapy.

According to the notice, one of the authors mixed up the control samples with the clinical samples, and “could not recall which samples were in the wrong group.” The paper hasn’t yet been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s the notice in Medical Oncology:

Continue reading Paper on circulating tumor cells taken out of circulation after lab error

Publisher sets high bar: Only articles “with lowest plagiarism” will be accepted

jipbsMaybe you can be a little bit pregnant after all.

At least, that’s what the editors of the Journal of Innovations in Pharmaceutical and Biological Sciences would have submitters believe.

In a rather ham-handed invitation to authors received by a friend of Retraction Watch, the open-access journal “cordially” solicits papers with a helpful illustrated timeline (our comments in parentheses): Continue reading Publisher sets high bar: Only articles “with lowest plagiarism” will be accepted

Lancet journal puts ICU paper on watch after authors acknowledge potentially fatal flaw

lancetrmLancet Respiratory Medicine has issued an expression of concern for a meta-analysis on tracheostomy in the intensive care unit that they published earlier this year.

The paper, “Effect of early versus late or no tracheostomy on mortality of critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation: a systematic review and meta-analysis“, came from a group at Harvard, Weill Cornell and the University of Athens. The authors purported to find that: Continue reading Lancet journal puts ICU paper on watch after authors acknowledge potentially fatal flaw

“Significant” copying forces retraction of sternotomy paper

icatsInteractive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery has yanked a 2005 sternotomy paper by a group of researchers who plagiarized from an earlier article on the subject.

The article, “The complications of repeat median sternotomy in paediatrics: six-months follow-up of consecutive cases,” came from a team at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England, and has been cited eight times, according to Scopus.

Here’s the notice:

Continue reading “Significant” copying forces retraction of sternotomy paper

“Know how to recognize pseudoscience:” Reader reveals how fish oil paper came to be retracted

Ian Garber
Ian Garber

After our post yesterday on a fishy retraction from author Brian Peskin, a reader who alerted the journal to problems got in touch to give us the lowdown.

Ian Garber is in the last year of medical residency at the University of British Columbia. Here’s the story he told us via email: Continue reading “Know how to recognize pseudoscience:” Reader reveals how fish oil paper came to be retracted

PubPeer Selections: Corrections in PNAS, PLOS Pathogens after PubPeer critiques; how old is too old?

pubpeerHere’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: Corrections in PNAS, PLOS Pathogens after PubPeer critiques; how old is too old?

“Undeclared competing interest” sinks fish oil takedown by author fined for deceptive claims

Snake swallowing a whole fish
Image via Jesse Palmer

The Journal of Lipids has retracted an aggressively negative review article called “Why Fish Oil Fails,” written by one Brian S. Peskin, whose bogus health claims have landed him in plenty of hot water in the past.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading “Undeclared competing interest” sinks fish oil takedown by author fined for deceptive claims

It’s happened again: Journal “cannot rule out” possibility author did his own peer review

ijkcThomson Reuters’ online peer review system ScholarOne is having quite a year.

This summer, a scientist exploited basic security flaws in how the system accepts author suggestions for peer reviewers to review a whole pile of his own manuscripts, ultimately resulting in the retraction of 60 papers and the resignation of the Taiwan minister of education.

Now, another journal that uses the system, Wiley’s International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, has retracted a paper because the authors provided their own peer reviewers and “the identity of the peer reviewers could subsequently not be verified.”

We asked editor Craig A. Taatjes if he was concerned the authors had conducted their own peer review. His response is reflective of many of the breaches we’ve seen so far for these online systems: Continue reading It’s happened again: Journal “cannot rule out” possibility author did his own peer review

“I kind of like that about science:” Harvard diabetes breakthrough muddied by two new papers

douglas_melton
Doug Melton

Harvard stem cell researcher Doug Melton got a lot of press last year for research on a hormone he named betatrophin, after its supposed ability to increase production of beta cells, which regulate insulin.

Now, the conclusions from that paper, which has been cited 59 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, have been called into question by research from an independent group, as well as follow-up work from the original team.

The interest was driven by the hormone’s potential as a new treatment for diabetes. In 2013, Melton told the Harvard Gazette that betatrophin could be in clinical trials within three to five years. Here’s Kerry Grens in The Scientist: Continue reading “I kind of like that about science:” Harvard diabetes breakthrough muddied by two new papers