A day after Tilburg University released its preliminary report on psychologist Diederik Stapel, Science has issued an “expression of concern” about one of his papers.
Today, we have the pleasure of presenting a guest post from Mico Tatalovic, who has just published a piece in the monthly magazineTehnopolis on retractions in journals in his home country, Croatia. Here, he describes the reporting that went into that feature, which he says was inspired by Retraction Watch.
You may think that in a country with regular plagiarism scandals there would be many retractions. But a search for ‘retractions’ in the open-access depository of academic journals, Hrcak Srce, shows only two retraction notices among more than 70,000 articles in 271 journals indexed there.
The journal Cancer Prevention Research has retracted a 2009 article by a group of scientists from the University of Kentucky after the institution determined that one of the figures in the article wasn’t kosher.
The article, “Psoralidin, an Herbal Molecule, Inhibits Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase–Mediated Akt Signaling in Androgen-Independent Prostate Cancer Cells,” has been cited 9 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Earlier iterations of the research were presented at two cancer meetings in 2008.
Last March, the journal Genomicsretracted a paper, “Discovery of transcriptional regulators and signaling pathways in the developing pituitary gland by bioinformatic and genomic approaches,” for reasons that don’t really fit into a tight lede sentence. Let’s just say that at times the problems involved both questions of authorship and the validity of the research. More on all that in a moment.
Meanwhile, things change. Now the journal, an Elsevier title, is un-retracting (that can’t be a real word, can it?) the retraction. You’d think that would please the authors, and it does to an extent. But they also wonder, legitimately, whether the original retraction will refuse to relinquish its grip on the resurrected article and consign it to database oblivion.
We’ve been following the case of Zhiguo Wang, the former Montreal Heart Institute researcher who was forced to resign his post in early September following an investigation into his work. At the time of that announcement, two retractions of the Wang group’s papers — which we had reported on in August — had appeared. The Institute said they had requested three more.
We figured that meant a total of five, although the Institute wouldn’t say which they were. So when we found out about a third retraction, in the Journal of Cell Science, we said it was the first of the remaining three.
Mashup of Chevron-SpongeBob ad courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmcintosh/
While looking at a recent retraction notice in the Journal of Phycology, the one of us with small children at home couldn’t help but imagine a conversation between cartoon character SpongeBob and his nemesis, Plankton:
SpongeBob: You used me … for land development! That wasn’t nice.
Sheldon J. Plankton: Haven’t you figured it out, SpongeBob? Nice guys finish last. Only aggressive people conquer the world. Ha ha ha ha!
SpongeBob: Well … what about aggressively nice people?
Who knew the world of phytoplankton could be so cutthroat? (Spoiler alert: we did.)
Consider: The Journal of Phycology — phycology is the study of algae and related organisms — is retracting a paper after learning that one of the three co-authors, well, wasn’t. Cyanobacteria may be the oldest known life form on earth, but the hyper-ambitious aren’t far behind.
The other day we reported that Naoki Mori had lost his 23rd paper to retraction for image manipulation and duplication. Turns out we were wrong by a pretty wide margin.
The International Journal of Cancer has retracted seven more articles by the disgraced Japanese researcher, all for the same reasons:
The following article has been retracted through agreement between the first author and several coauthors, the journal Editor in-Chief, Peter Lichter, and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. … After an investigation the retraction has been agreed due to inappropriate duplication of images and overlap with other published work.
A day after Tilburg University released its preliminary report on psychologist Diederik Stapel, Science has issued an “expression of concern” about one of his papers.
