Four papers from a team of researchers in Japan have received expressions of concern for overlap in control samples, data, study design and statistical analyses. The publisher of the articles says it has closed its investigation.
The notices were published in PLOS One from July 31 to August 3 to inform readers of “study design concerns” and to provide additional supplementary data. They also cite a pair of related papers in other journals for the same problems, but those articles remain unmarked.
Masaya Oki, a professor of applied chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Fukui in Japan, is the corresponding author on all six papers. Each discusses the effects of a different gene inhibitor on cataracts taken from rat eyes. While the authors used multiple methods to study these effects, the EOCs concern the results obtained using microarrays to compare lens samples.
Continue reading PLOS One slaps four papers with expressions of concern for overlapping control data