science (journal) retractions

After 15 years of controversy, Science retracts ‘arsenic life’ paper

*Science* has retracted a 2010 paper describing a strain of bacteria that purportedly substituted arsenic for phosphorus, an element present in all known life.
*Science*/AAAS

Fifteen years after publishing an explosive but long-criticized paper claiming to describe a microbe that could substitute arsenic for phosphate in its chemical makeup, Science is retracting the article, citing “expanded” criteria for retraction.

The authors stand by their findings and disagree with the retraction, and contend the decision doesn’t reflect best practices for publishers.

Many scientists, including David Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind. who has previously argued for the paper’s retraction in posts for Retraction Watch, believe the paper’s results were simply the result of contamination of the authors’ materials. He told us he was “glad” to see the retraction.

10 years after the downfall of a same-sex marriage canvassing study, tenure, some better practices — and an engagement

A study on how conversations can change minds grabbed headlines when it was published — and again five months later when retracted.

“Gay Advocates Can Shift Same-Sex Marriage Views,” read the New York Times headline. “Doorstep visits change attitudes on gay marriage,” declared the Los Angeles Times. “Cure Homophobia With This One Weird Trick!” Slate spouted.

Driving those headlines was a December 2014 study in Science, by Michael J. LaCour, then a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green, a professor at Columbia University.

Researchers praised the “buzzy new study,” as Slate called it at the time, for its robust effects and impressive results. The key finding: A brief conversation with a gay door-to-door canvasser could change the mind of someone opposed to same-sex marriage.

By the time the study was published, David Broockman, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, had already seen LaCour’s results and was keen to pursue his own version of it. He and fellow graduate student Joshua Kalla had collaborated before and wanted to look more closely at the impact canvassing could have on elections. But as the pair deconstructed LaCour’s study to figure out how to replicate it, they hit several curious stumbling blocks. And when they got a hold of LaCour’s dataset, or replication package, they quickly realized the results weren’t adding up.

Science paper by Toronto lab retracted

Anomalies in Figure 1 of a 2014 *Science* paper, a portion of which is shown here, is one of several in question in a retraction published in the January 10 *Science*. *Source*

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:

Climate paper retracted from Science over miscalculations

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.

Stanford president retracts two Science papers following investigation

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:

Contamination leads to swift retraction for Science paper on the origins of Omicron in Africa

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”:

Another ‘Majorana’ particle paper retracted, this time from Science

Nearly 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:

‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

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:

Science retracts coral reef recovery paper more than a year after a report on allegations in its own pages

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”:

Chemistry paper retracted from Science

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:

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