For the second time inside of a week, we come to praise scientists who did the right thing when they realized their lab equipment or reagents weren’t performing as expected.
Here’s the retraction of a 2011 paper in Cerebral Cortex: Continue reading Scientists doing the right thing: Malfunctioning lab equipment leads to retraction of neuroscience paper
Regulatory Peptides is retracting a 2010 paper by a group of five authors in China and one in Texas — and the presence of that last one was the problem.
The article, “Erythropoietin as a possible mechanism for the effects of intermittent hypoxia on bodyweight, serum glucose and leptin in mice,” had as its last (dare we say, senior) author Susan T. Howard, a mycobacterium expert at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Tyler. Trouble was, Howard disavowed any role in the paper.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading One-too-many authors scuttles paper on mouse metabolism
Two more papers by Diederik Stapel — who was profiled by The New York Times Magazine this weekend — have been retracted, both in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The notice for “Hardly thinking about close and distant others: On cognitive business and target closeness in social comparison effects,” by Stapel and David Marx, and cited six times: Continue reading “Unfinished business”: Diederik Stapel retraction count rises to 53
A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota have retracted a paper in Diabetes for image problems, but exactly what happened is still under investigation.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Diabetes paper retracted for “misgrouping errors” that remain under investigation
A group of cancer researchers in Japan has retracted their 2011 paper in the journal Medicine. The reason: They seem to have had some trouble — well, perhaps a bit more than some — with their patient population.
The article, titled “Usefulness of systemic CT scanning in the detection of malignant lymphadenopathy,” came from the lab of Norio Komatsu, a hematologist at Juntendo University School of Medicine.
The paper’s no longer online, but we did find an abstract floating around: Continue reading Authors retract CT scan-cancer paper, citing faulty data
Rui Curi — the Brazilian scientist who threatened to sue the now-shuttered Science-Fraud.org site for criticizing his work — has rung up his second retraction, this one for a paper that he corrected earlier this year.
Here’s the Journal of Endocrinology notice, whose headers and language are a bit confusing, understandably, because it is retracting two things, a correction and the original paper: Continue reading Streisand Effect meets tough editors as journal retracts already-corrected paper by Rui Curi
Another paper by Milena Penkowa, who is being investigated for embezzlement as well as possible scientific misconduct, has been subject to an Expression of Concern:
Here’s the notice in Glia: Continue reading Another Expression of Concern for Milena Penkowa
They say that a poor workman blames his tools. If you’re a scientist and you discover your tools don’t do exactly what you thought they did, however, the right thing to do is let other scientists relying on your work know.
That’s what the University of Auckland’s Nigel Birch and colleagues did recently, after a 2012 study they published in the Journal of Neurochemistry didn’t hold up. Here’s the notice, which we’d consider a model for retractions everywhere: Continue reading A model retraction in the Journal of Neurochemistry for “unexpected effect” of a filter
A team of researchers in Ireland has retracted two papers from Cancer Letters after concerns were apparently raised about some of the studies’ figures.
Denise Egan, of the Institute of Technology Tallaght in Dublin, and colleagues published “In vitro anti-tumour and cyto-selective effects of coumarin-3-carboxylic acid and three of its hydroxylated derivatives, along with their silver-based complexes, using human epithelial carcinoma cell lines” and “A study of the role of apoptotic cell death and cell cycle events mediating the mechanism of action of 6-hydroxycoumarin-3-carboxylatosilver in human malignant hepatic cells” in 2007.
The two notices say the same thing: Continue reading Two cancer papers retracted because authors “are unable to guarantee the accuracy of some of the figures”
Martin Biosse-Duplan, a former Harvard dental school research fellow found by the Office of Research Integrity to have falsified results has had the two papers in question retracted.
From the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research: Continue reading Two retractions appear for former Harvard dental researcher found to have committed misconduct