Karel Bezouška, the scientist who tried to derail an investigation into his work by breaking into a lab refrigerator has had an eighth paper retracted.
Here’s the notice for “Synthetic N-Acetyl-d-glucosamine Based Fully Branched Tetrasaccharide, a Mimetic of the Endogenous Ligand for CD69, Activates CD69+ Killer Lymphocytes upon Dimerization via a Hydrophilic Flexible Linker:” Continue reading Researcher who tampered with investigation up to 8 retractions
A group of physicists has retracted their preliminary report in the GCN Circular of a massive star-sized explosion after deciding that what they’d really observed was another phenomenon.
Although we could try to explain this, we’d rather leave it up to Giacomo Vianello, an experimental physicist at Stanford University, who was a member of the research team.
Vianello told us: Continue reading Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder where you went: Astronomy report retracted
Earlier this month, we brought you the story of a retraction from the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology involving rivalry and alleged sock puppetry. The author of the now-retracted letter, physicist Lorenzo Iorio, claimed that another researcher was using fake names to criticize his work on arXiv.At the time, the editor of the journal had told everyone concerned that the letter would be retracted, but the retraction notice hadn’t yet appeared. Now it has.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction of letter alleging sock puppetry now cites “legal reasons”
One of the complaints we often hear about the self-correcting nature of science is that authors and editors seem very reluctant to retract papers with obvious fatal flaws. Indeed, it seems fairly clear that the number of papers retracted is smaller than the number of those that should be.
To try to get a sense of how errors are corrected in the literature, Arturo Casadevall, Grant Steen, and Ferric Fang, whose work on retractions will be familiar to our readers, in a new paper in the FASEB Journal, look at the sources of error in papers retracted for reasons other than misconduct.
Here’s the abstract (emphasis ours): Continue reading “Barriers to retraction may impede correction of the literature:” New study
Pfizer has retracted another study involving an experimental cancer drug that later failed later-stage trials.
The study, published in Clinical Cancer Research in 2010, looked at which patients might respond to the drug, called figitumumab. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Pfizer retracts another experimental cancer drug study
Oncology Reviews has retracted a 2014 paper on breast cancer after learning that the authors lifted parts of it from a continuing medical education lesson on Medscape.
The paper, “Challenges of combined everolimus/endocrine therapy in hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer,” was written by Yousif Abubakr, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and Yasar Albushra, of King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, in Saudi Arabia.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Authors plagiarize CME cancer article, lose their review paper
The authors of a Current Biology paper published online in February of this year have retracted it after voluminous criticism on post-publication review site PubPeer and a university committee found evidence of figure manipulation.
The paper, “Agonist-Induced GPCR Shedding from the Ciliary Surface Is Dependent on ESCRT-III and VPS4,” was co-authored by Hua Jin and Livana Soetedjo, a graduate student in Jin’s lab. Soetedjo was first author, and Jin was corresponding author.
The comments at PubPeer began on March 24: Continue reading Authors retract Current Biology study following criticism on PubPeer and university investigation
A group of researchers at Istanbul University has swiftly retracted a paper they published in March in the British Journal of Cancer once it became clear that they were using the wrong antibody.
Here’s the notice for “Clinical significance of p95HER2 overexpression, PTEN loss and PI3K expression in p185HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients treated with trastuzumab-based therapies:” Continue reading Researchers retract breast cancer study after realizing they were using the wrong antibody
We recently came across a paper in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, an Elsevier title, that had been temporarily removed without explanation. While we see a fair number of such opaque notices from Elsevier — and have written about why we think they’re a bad idea — we took interest in this one because the last author, Toren Finkel of the NIH, was the corresponding author of a Nature paper retracted earlier this year. (He also had two corrections on one Science paper, both of which are paywalled.)
What we learned suggests the withdrawal was completely unrelated to the Nature retraction, but also reveals a journal editor’s exasperation.
Last month, we published a guest post by Jean Hazel Mendoza about the retraction of a Molecular Cell paper for sampling errors, flawed analysis, and and miscalculation.
Mendoza heard back from Jean-François Allemand, the head of one of the labs involved. Allemand tells Retraction Watch by email that when his group tried to repeat the experiment, they suspected of “missing” or “averaging” of data points in the retracted paper: Continue reading Update: Lab head shares “painful” process that led to Molecular Cell retraction