Another retraction notice for a paper published by Silvia Bulfone-Paus and colleagues has appeared, this one for a 2005 paper in Molecular and Cellular Biology.
The retraction notice is brief but to the point: Continue reading Ninth Bulfone-Paus retraction notice appears, in Molecular and Cellular Biology
The Korean Journal of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery has retracted 17 papers, with the common theme of ‘overlap’ — almost always a euphemism for plagiarism, whether self or otherwise.
Published between 1993 and 2006, the articles came from a group of authors at the department of otolaryngology at Ajou University School of Medicine in Suwon, South Korea. Their topics range from “The Effects of Intratympanic Steroid Injection for the Patients with Refractory Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss” to “Study for Reversibility of Experimental Cholesteatoma Using Mongolian Gerbil.”
The retraction notices all read basically the same way. Here’s the one for the gerbil paper: Continue reading Korean ENT journal retracts 17 papers, citing ‘overlap’
The journal Orthopedics is retracting a paper by Chinese researchers who appear to have been a little to hasty to submit their manuscript.
Titled “Comparison of the mini-midvastus with the mini-medial parapatellar approach in primary TKA,” the October 2010 paper purported to describe a prospective, randomized study comparing two approaches to total knee arthroplasty, or knee replacement surgery. The authors, from First Affiliated Hospital of Suzhou University, stated that “all knees were implanted with the same posterior-stabilized prosthesis by the same surgeon,” a Dr. Tang.
Having claimed to have separated the effects of the surgery from those of the prosthetic — in this case, the Genesis II device from Smith & Nephew — the authors said that the study was able to demonstrate that “the early clinical results are similar between the mini-midvastus and mini-medial parapatellar approach. The mini-medial parapatellar approach is easier to initially apply and provides better visualization for TKA.”
Except that it didn’t. Continue reading TKO for knee replacement paper, but notice raises more questions than it answers
The number of retraction notices of papers co-authored by Silvia Bulfone-Paus is up to eight.
The Journal of Leukocyte Biology, which was apparently the first to announce they had accepted a retraction, has published its notice: Continue reading Two more Bulfone-Paus retraction notices appear
Since we first wrote about the travails of Spirocor’s bedside, noninvasive test for coronary artery disease, we’ve been trying, without much success, to find out more information.
But as they say about every dog, our day has come.
As we initially reported, Ron Waksman, a prominent Washington, D.C. cardiologist and editor-in-chief of Cardiovascular and Revascularization Medicine, was first author of one of two papers about the Spirocor technology that were published in 2010. The other, by Shiyovich, et al, was retracted earlier this month by the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, which triggered our interest in this case.
At the time, we couldn’t find any evidence that Waksman’s article had been retracted, and Waksman has not responded to multiple requests for comment. Today we spoke with Kate Coons, the journal’s managing editor, who told us that the authors had sought a retraction for the article, “An innovative noninvasive respiratory stress test indicates significant coronary artery disease,” in December, and that it had posted one on its website on Jan. 6 of this year. It will be in print in an upcoming issue.
The notice is not available on Medline, but it can be found on ScienceDirect: Continue reading More on SPIROCOR noninvasive heart disease test: Second retraction (in fact the first) says little
Since the weekend, we’ve been trying to get more details on a somewhat mysterious retraction in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The sparse notice really only said that there were “data inconsistencies” that made the data unreliable.
On Monday, as we noted in an update to the post yesterday, we learned:
The inconsistencies related to what an individual’s lab-book recorded in terms of patients and infections. These came to light when this data was compared to hospital records, during the process of manuscript preparation. As noted, we reported our concerns about the validity of the data and following a review, there was no adequate explanation and the concerns remained.
We still couldn’t tell whether this was error or falsification. Late last night, we got the answer from co-author Euan Tovey: Continue reading Update on mysterious JACI retraction: Data were falsified
Another retraction notice for a paper by Silvia Bulfone-Paus and colleagues has appeared, this one for a 2007 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), “Soluble IL-15Rα is generated by alternative splicing or proteolytic cleavage and forms functional complexes with Il-15.”
This is the sixth retraction notice of a promised 12 in several journals. The original paper has been cited 37 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Some of the notices have gone into great detail about what was wrong with the original papers, and journals have even allowed the team to declare that some of the results had been replicated. One simply said there had been misconduct.
Then there’s this one: Continue reading Bulfone-Paus retraction notice appears in the Journal of Biological Chemistry
The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology has retracted a 2009 abstract, but don’t ask us why. The retraction notice for “Children with asthma and no URTI, more commonly have rhinovirus in their exhaled breath, than in mucous,” is another one we’ll file under “opaque“: Continue reading A mysterious retraction in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
We’re continuing to follow the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia. As we reported on Tuesday, Ahluwalia was dismissed from graduate school at the University of Cambridge years before a University College London (UCL) investigation found had renumbered files to deceive a co-author, and had likely sabotaged his colleagues’ work while manipulating his solutions to improve how his results looked. The results of that investigation came to light as part of a Nature retraction.
Ahluwalia now works — and studies plagiarism, in fact — at the school of health and bioscience at the University of East London. We asked Neville Punchard, the school’s dean, whether the university was aware of Ahluwalia’s past. Punchard replied by email: Continue reading University of East London “looking into” Jatinder Ahluwalia’s career
Last week, we reported that the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology had noted that a 2002 paper by Silvia Bulfone-Paus and colleagues had been retracted, but hadn’t yet published the retraction notice. A commenter tipped us off this week that the notice is out: Continue reading Scandinavian Journal of Immunology publishes Bulfone-Paus retraction notice