A 2014 paper in Science by a lab in Toronto has been retracted after a December expression of concern raised “potential data integrity issues.”
The paper, “Mitosis Inhibits DNA Double-Strand Break Repair to Guard Against Telomere Fusions,” is from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.
The retraction notice, published today and signed by all of the original authors, reads, in part:
Continue reading Science paper by Toronto lab retracted
The authors of a paper published in Science have retracted their article following the discovery of calculation errors.
The article,“Drought sensitivity in mesic forests heightens their vulnerability to climate change” by Robert Heilmayr of the University of California, Santa Barbara and colleagues found that in drier areas, trees are less sensitive to drought and in hotter regions with a wet climate, tree growth is expected to decrease.
It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Since its publication in December, the article has been downloaded 4,641 times, posted by 154 X users, and written about by 20 news outlets and press release sites.
Continue reading Climate paper retracted from Science over miscalculations
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whose resignation as president of Stanford University becomes effective today, is retracting two papers from Science following an institutional investigation that found data manipulation in multiple figures.
Both articles, “Hierarchical Organization of Guidance Receptors: Silencing of Netrin Attraction by Slit Through a Robo/DCC Receptor Complex,” and “Binding of DCC by Netrin-1 to Mediate Axon Guidance Independent of Adenosine A2B Receptor Activation,” were published in 2001, when Tessier-Lavigne, the corresponding author, was at the University of California, San Francisco. They have been cited well over 600 times in total, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Anonymous users on PubPeer posted concerns about potentially manipulated images in the papers as early as 2015. Reporting by The Stanford Daily in November 2022 spurred the university to launch an investigation into several of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers, how he responded when others identified issues in his articles, and the culture of his lab.
The university published the final report last month, finding that four of the five papers it reviewed on which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author contained “apparent manipulation of research data by others.” Tessier-Lavigne, the investigation committee concluded:
Continue reading Stanford president retracts two Science papers following investigation
The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.
The article, “Gradual emergence followed by exponential spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Africa,” was published in Science on December 1 by a team led by Jan Felix Drexler of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.
Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:
Continue reading Contamination leads to swift retraction for Science paper on the origins of Omicron in AfricaNearly a year after marking a paper on the elusive “Majorana” particle with an expression of concern, and almost three years after publishing a critique of its reproducibility, Science has retracted the article due to “serious irregularities and discrepancies” in the data.
A few papers about Majorana particles, which would be useful in quantum computing if scientists could indeed produce and detect them, have been retracted, flagged with expressions of concern, or otherwise proven difficult to reproduce.
The latest article to be retracted, “Chiral Majorana fermion modes in a quantum anomalous Hall insula- tor–superconductor structure,” has been cited more than 400 times since it was published in 2017, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. About 10 percent of those citations have come since Science’s editors published their expression of concern last December.
The retraction notice states:
Continue reading Another ‘Majorana’ particle paper retracted, this time from Science
On the heels of a high-profile retraction that followed deep investigations by the Science news team, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the journal, says it’s time to improve the process of correcting the scientific record.
In an editorial published today, Thorp, a former university provost, describes the often time-consuming and frustrating process involving journals, universities, and government agencies that are often at odds, or at least have different priorities. Based on the experience of what can feel like gridlock, he calls for breaking the process into two stages:
Continue reading ‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process
Fifteen months after its news division published an investigation into work on coral reef recovery, Science has retracted a 2014 paper on the subject.
The article, “Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting corals and fishes: A tipping point that may limit reef recovery,” was written by a group at Georgia Institute of Technology led by Danielle Dixson, then a postdoc at the university. Science issued an expression of concern in February of this year, as we reported then.
According to the retraction notice, signed by Science editor in chief Holden Thorp, the University of Delaware, Lewes, where Dixson has been running her own lab, “no longer [has] confidence in the validity of the data”:
Continue reading Science retracts coral reef recovery paper more than a year after a report on allegations in its own pages
Science has retracted a 2020 paper which hinted at the future of eco-friendly pharmaceuticals after concluding that the data had been manipulated.
The article, “Asymmetric remote C–H borylation of aliphatic amides and esters with a modular iridium catalyst,” came from a team anchored by Masaya Sawamura, of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo.
Funding for the study – which has been cited 57 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – came from the Japanese government and the Uehara Memorial Foundation. Hokkaido is now investigating, Science said.
[Please see an update on this post.]
The paper received some attention, including this article in Chemistry & Engineering News which described the results this way:
Continue reading Chemistry paper retracted from Science
When Kevin Wagner at the University of Arizona and colleagues published a paper in Science about their discovery of a new planet in 2016, it captured the attention of a lot of science writers.
Finding the object – HD 131399 – meant that “astronomers have discovered a planet with an even more exotic sight on its horizon: a triple sunset,” in the words of The New York Times.
Or, as the AP put it, “a planet with triple sunrises and sunsets every day for part of the year.”
Continue reading Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star
Science has retracted a 13-year-old paper, five years after data sleuth Elisabeth Bik first raised questions about issues with the images in the article.
The paper, “Secondary siRNAs result from unprimed RNA synthesis and form a distinct class,” appeared in 2007 and was written by a group of researchers in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The senior author of the study was Ronald Plasterk, founder of Frame Cancer Therapeutics in Amsterdam and once a minister in the Dutch government. The article has been cited at least 300 times, according to Clarivate Analytics Web of Science.
It also drew Bik’s attention. In 2015, she posted — as Peer 1 — on PubPeer about her concerns with one of the figures in the paper. Other commenters joined in, including to point out similarities between images in the Science paper and two other articles from members of the group.
Bik said the paper:
Continue reading Science retracts paper co-authored by high-profile scientist and former Dutch minister.jpg){kind=link}