Two more papers from Dutch fraudster Diederik Stapel have been retracted. Both appeared in the journal Psychological Science in 2008, with the same, evidently unwitting co-author, Kirsten Ruys, of Tilburg University.
Here is the notice: Continue reading Withdraw that emotion: Psych journal retracts two Stapel papers on mood
The body count has reached three for a group of German tissue engineers who appear to have cloned their data in many of their publications.
Tissue Engineering Part A has retracted one of the papers from the investigators, titled “Clinically established hemostatic scaffold (tissue fleece) as biomatrix in tissue- and organ-engineering research,” which was published in 2003.
The notice states: Continue reading Reverse tissue engineering: data reuse causes retractions of three papers from German organ researchers
Back in April, a group of French and Tunisian researchers published a paper in Biomaterials which came to the astonishing conclusion that buckyballs (carbon tetrachloride) coated in olive oil could dramatically extend the lives of lab rodents. That news was picked up by Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, on which he expressed some bemusement about the work but ultimately praised it:
These are reasonable (but unproven) hypotheses, and I very much look forward to seeing this work followed up to see some more light shed on them. The whole life-extension result needs to be confirmed as well, and in other species. I congratulate the authors of this work, though, for giving me the most number of raised eyebrows I’ve had while reading a scientific paper in quite some time.
One of those eyebrows dropped a bit the following day, when Lowe reported that readers had pointed him to a clear case of image duplication in the article. At the time, Lowe concluded: Continue reading Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems
Caution: Sexual innuendo ahead.
The withdrawal method is a notoriously unreliable form of birth control. It seems that what happens between the sheets applies to paper as well as cotton.
Here’s a retraction notice from BMC Research Notes that speaks — and nudges and winks — for itself. The 2011 article, “Effect of controlled and uncontrolled cooling rate on motility parameters of cryopreserved ram spermatozoa,” by a team of Irani veterinary scientists: Continue reading Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper
We love history at Retraction Watch, but with few exceptions, such as covering what seems to have been the first-ever English language retraction in 1756, the daily march of retractions doesn’t leave us much time to take steps back. So we’re very glad to be able to present a guest post by our friend Jeff Perkel about a classic paper that scientists have known to be wrong for most of its nearly 60-year-life — and yet remains in the literature.
The date is December 31, 1952. Linus Pauling, the CalTech wunder-chemist who had recently solved the secondary structure of proteins by describing the alpha-helix and the beta-sheet, has just submitted a “Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids” to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The PNAS description appears in February 1953 and runs for 14 pages, with seven figures and two tables (compare that with Watson and Crick’s one-pager two months later in Nature).
Pauling also submitted a short note to Nature to alert that journal’s readers to the basics of the PNAS paper. The Nature note appeared in the journal’s February 21 issue: Continue reading Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?
Sebastian Schuchmann, a neuroscience researcher whose duplication errors led to a Cell correction last year, has retracted a 12-year-old paper in the Journal of Neurochemistry whose figures were copied from two of his earlier papers.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Author whose duplications forced Cell correction retracts paper on Down syndrome
The social psychology community, already rocked last year by the Diederik Stapel scandal, now has another set of allegations to dissect. Dirk Smeesters, a professor of consumer behavior and society at the Rotterdam School of Management, part of Erasmus University, has resigned amid serious questions about his work.
According to an Erasmus press release, a scientific integrity committee found that the results in two of Smeesters’ papers were statistically highly unlikely. Smeesters could not produce the raw data behind the findings, and told the committee that he cherry-picked the data to produce a statistically significant result. Those two papers are being retracted, and the university accepted Smeesters’ resignation on June 21.
The release also takes pains to say that the university has no reason to doubt the work of his co-authors. You can read the complete report in Dutch, with Smeesters’ co-authors’ names blacked out, in an NRC Handelsblad story.
Erasmus tells Retraction Watch that these are the two papers being retracted: Continue reading Following investigation, Erasmus social psychology professor retracts two studies, resigns
Edward Shang, the weight loss surgeon who lost his job at the University of Leipzig in May after it was revealed that he had made up most, if not all, of the patients in his research studies at the University of Mannheim, has retracted three more papers.
Here’s the notice, which is a bit, um, lean, given what we know about the case: Continue reading Three more retractions for weight loss surgeon Edward Shang for making up data
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A is retracting a 2010 paper whose authors misappropriated data, forged an author name — and got a pretty strong backhand slap for the trouble.
The paper, “Green waxes, adhesives and lubricants,” which refers to eco-friendly materials, not Halloween-friendly slimes, was published by a group of researchers from China and Canada. Problem was, the one from Canada evidently didn’t know she was listed on the manuscript, and a big chunk of the work had been misappropriated from her university.
As the notice explains: Continue reading Misconduct burns authors of wax paper, leads to sharply worded retraction notice
With temperatures at Retraction Watch’s New York HQ threatening to break 100 degrees today — that’s nearly 38 degrees Celsius for those of you in the rest of the world — what better way to take our minds off the heat than by writing about than skiing?
Lucky for us, the author of a paper in the Journal of Maps about new ways to create ski resort maps — aka the “Breckenridge schematic map” — has retracted it. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Updated: Ski resort paper hits a (media) mogul and gets retracted