Jesús A. Lemus, the Spanish veterinary researcher whose work has been the subject of a misconduct inquiry, has another retraction for his CV. It’s his third, according to our count.
With apologies to the Bangles for this post’s title, we have another vulture-related retraction from Jesús A. Lemus, the Spanish veterinary researcher whose results have come into question.
This one involves a paper that appeared in PLoS ONE in 2009, titled “Susceptibility to Infection and Immune Response in Insular and Continental Populations of Egyptian Vulture: Implications for Conservation.”
A group of researchers from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the U.S. have retracted a 2008 paper in the Journal of Immunology after being unable to verify the contents of some key figures.
The authors of a paper suggesting that cassava, a starchy vegetable that’s a major food source in much of the developing world, could one day be turned into a food staple “capable of supplying inexpensive, plant-based proteins for food, feed and industrial applications” have retracted it, following an institutional investigation that failed to find critical supporting data.
PLoS ONE has issued an expression of concern over a 2010 paper by Chinese scientists about how the immune system responds to the vaccine against the swine flu.
The Spanish press has picked up on the story of a prominent veterinary scientist in that country who has been accused of research misconduct.
According to El Pais, the researcher, Jesús Ángel Lemus, whose areas of interest include the effects of toxins on birds, ran into trouble in December when colleagues complained to the Ethics Committee of the Higher Council for Scientific Research about the reproducibility of his results and other problems. That triggered an inquiry by the CSIC into Lemus’ body of work, an investigation that, evidently, could not find a body.
One of the issues we’ve touched on at Retraction Watch is what happens once papers are retracted. A few studies have found that other authors continue to cite those studies anyway, without noting their withdrawal from the literature. A more recent paper found that retractions are linked to a dramatic decline in citations (see last half of post). And we’ve reported on one case in which the authors of a retracted study decided not to cite it at all when they republished their findings elsewhere.
PLoS One and Nature Medicine have issued corrections for papers by Zhiguo Wang, the former Montreal Heart Institute researcher who resigned in September following an investigation into image manipulation in his lab.