Category: by journal

Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears?

Title: Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy

What Caught Our Attention: There’s a lot going on here, so bear with us. (Ba-dum-bum.)

First, there was the paper itself, co-authored by, among others, Michael Mann and Stephan Lewandowsky. Both names may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers. Mann is a prominent climate scientist who has sued the National Review for defamation. A study by Lewandowsky and colleagues of “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” was the subject of several Retraction Watch posts when it was retracted and then republished in a different form. And the conclusion of the new paper, in Bioscience, seemed likely to draw the ire of many who objected to the earlier work: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears?

Clue fans, here’s scientific proof that it was Colonel Mustard with a candlestick

Leo Reynolds, via Flickr

When we last heard from Eve Armstrong one year ago today, she was a postdoc at the BioCircuits Institute at the University of California, San Diego, musing mathematically about what would have happened if she had asked one Barry Cottonfield to her high school prom in 1997. Today, she is a postdoc at the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania — where, it would appear from a new preprint, titled “Colonel Mustard in the Aviary with the Candlestick: a limit cycle attractor transitions to a stable focus via supercritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation,” she has solved a brutal murder.

To be more precise:

We establish the means by which Mr. Boddy came to transition from a stable trajectory within the global phase space of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a stable point on the cement floor of an aviary near the west bank of the Schuylkill River.

The preprint will be posted at arXiv tomorrow, but Armstrong did not want to keep the world in suspense any longer, so we are hosting the manuscript here at Retraction Watch on a more appropriate day, April 1. She was also kind enough to answer a few questions about the work: Continue reading Clue fans, here’s scientific proof that it was Colonel Mustard with a candlestick

Nature journal retracts controversial CRISPR paper after authors admit results may be wrong

Nature Methods has retracted a 2017 paper suggesting a common gene editing technique may cause widespread collateral damage to the genome.

The notice has a long backstory: After the paper was published, it immediately drew an outcry from critics (including representatives from companies who sell the tool, whose stock fell after publication). Some critics argued that the authors, led by Vinit B. Mahajan at Stanford University, hadn’t employed sufficient controls, so they couldn’t be sure that the observed mutations stemmed from the tool, rather than normal background variation between mice. Only months after the paper appeared, the journal issued an expression of concern about the article. In a new preprint posted on BioRxiv on Monday, the authors concede that their critics may be right.

In the new preprint, Mahanjan and his colleagues acknowledge that the gene editing technique — known as CRISPR-Cas9 — “may not introduce numerous, unintended, off-target mutations.”

However, according to the retraction notice, Mahajan and several of his co-authors object to the retraction: Continue reading Nature journal retracts controversial CRISPR paper after authors admit results may be wrong

Caught Our Notice: Duplicates, errors prompt two retractions for same author

Titles: 1) Angiopoietin-Like 4 Confers Resistance to Hypoxia/Serum Deprivation-Induced Apoptosis through PI3K/Akt and ERK1/2 Signaling Pathways in Mesenchymal Stem Cells

2) Novel Mechanism of Inhibition of Dendritic Cells Maturation by Mesenchymal Stem Cells via Interleukin-10 and the JAK1/STAT3 Signaling Pathway

What Caught Our Attention: In the span of 48 hours, PLOS ONE retracted two papers this month that were co-authored by Bo Yu, based at Key Laboratories of Education Ministry for Myocardial Ischemia Mechanism and Treatment and The Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University in China. Both notices cite multiple duplications and errors, and conclude:

Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Duplicates, errors prompt two retractions for same author

PNAS wouldn’t let authors cite unpublished manuscript. Now, it admits it was wrong.

Question: Do you value Retraction Watch? If so, would you consider a tax-deductible donation of $25, or a recurring donation of an amount of your choosing, to support us?

When researchers submitted a paper about a type of microparticle to PNAS, they wanted to give credit where it was due, and cite an unpublished manuscript that helped guide their work. But the journal’s policy forbid citing unpublished work, and the reference was removed before publication. Now, concerns from the authors of that unpublished work have prompted the journal to have a change of heart.  

Continue reading PNAS wouldn’t let authors cite unpublished manuscript. Now, it admits it was wrong.

“Absolutely mortified” after unintentionally plagiarizing, author offers to step down from new post

A few months ago, Dirk Werling discovered he had made a horrible mistake: He had inadvertently plagiarized in his recent review.

On January 20, Werling said he came across a 2016 paper while working on a grant and realized he had published some of the text in his 2018 review in Research in Veterinary Science. Werling — based at Royal Veterinary College at the University of London — told Retraction Watch:

I knew I needed to retract my paper.

Continue reading “Absolutely mortified” after unintentionally plagiarizing, author offers to step down from new post

Caught Our Notice: Yes, a 20-year-old article is wrong — but it won’t be corrected online

Title: AMPA receptor-mediated regulation of a Gi-protein in cortical neurons

What Caught Our Attention:  Usually, when journals publish corrections to articles, they also correct the original article, except when the original is unavailable online.  When Nature noticed that some figure panels in a 20-year-old paper were duplicated, it flagged the issue for readers — but didn’t correct the online version of the original paper. According to the notice, the duplications don’t disturb the conclusion illustrated by the figure, the original data couldn’t be found, and the last two authors had retired. We contacted a spokesperson at Nature, who told us “the information at the start of the paper clearly links to the corrigendum.”   Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Yes, a 20-year-old article is wrong — but it won’t be corrected online

Paper used to support WHO guidelines on preventing infections “has no scientific validity”

A surgery journal retracted a 2014 paper last month after discovering that the study has “no scientific validity.”

Mario Schietroma and his coauthors, based at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, reported that giving patients high concentrations of oxygen during and after colorectal surgery significantly reduced their risk of infections. Although the authors reported significant p-values, the retraction notice states that, “upon recalculation, no p-values were close to significant.” The University of L’Aquila told Retraction Watch it is investigating, but did not provide details. Continue reading Paper used to support WHO guidelines on preventing infections “has no scientific validity”

Authors claim clinical trial data came from one center. It came from three.

A BMJ journal has retracted a 2017 paper that made a false claim about the clinical trial in question. 

The Acupuncture in Medicine paper reported the results of a clinical trial about the impact of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine on stroke, gathered from one center. However, in November, the editors of the journal discovered that the authors had completed the trial at three centers, and had already published the data in Scientific Reports in 2016. The authors say the duplication and misrepresentation of the data stemmed from “confusion and misunderstanding.” Continue reading Authors claim clinical trial data came from one center. It came from three.

Author: “The retractions were about bureaucracy, not science”

A researcher has retracted two 2014 papers, after discovering they had not gone through the proper approval process before being submitted.

The papers were part of a collaboration funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which focused on solving protein structures. Adam Godzik, the senior author, told Retraction Watch that all papers had to be approved by a special committee before being submitted to a journal. Given the scale of the collaboration, the committee for the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG) would assess whether researchers who had made a previous contribution to the work should be added as authors.

Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics retracted both papers after Godzik informed the editor in August 2014 that neither article had undergone the required review before being submitted to the journal. Although Wiley agreed to the retractions in an email to Godzik in September 2014,  the papers were only pulled in January—more than three years later. Continue reading Author: “The retractions were about bureaucracy, not science”