The Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences has retracted a paper it published earlier this year on the use of facial biometrics to identify humans.
The reason: Evidently, those biometrics had already largely been described by another group.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading “Soft biometrics” for human ID paper guilty of identity theft, retracted
A group of researchers in Greece has lost a paper that they published twice.
Here’s the notice from Rural and Remote Health:
Continue reading Apply sunblock, repeat: Duplication forces retraction of paper on sun exposure among teens
The Indian Journal of Surgery, a Springer-Verlag title, has retracted a 2011 paper with a title only the Marquis de Sade would love: “Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings.”
We know what you’re saying: Who knew penises could be strangulated? Well, it’s true.
Continue reading Come again? “Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings” retracted for duplication
A new retraction notice in the Journal of Applied Physiology gives only a hint at the problems in the paper, but what it does say has led us to a story about one of its co-authors.
Here’s the notice, from a team at Duke: Continue reading Former Duke researcher charged with embezzlement has a paper retracted
A fraud investigation at a New York state research institution has led to two retractions of papers looking at genetic links to autism.
The 2011 papers, which appeared in Genes, Brain and Behavior, involve work conducted at the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities’ (OPWDD’s) Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, on Staten Island. The last author on both articles is Xiaohong Li, head of the institute’s cellular neurobiology laboratory.
Here’s what the retraction notice has to say: Continue reading Autism genetics papers retracted after fraud inquiry at NY research agency
We’ve written before about retractions for cell lines that turn out not to be what researchers thought they were. In a few cases, that has involved contamination by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks. Today, we note the retraction of a paper whose authors, from Taiwan, thought they were using human muscle cells that line blood vessels when they were actually studying such cells from rat embryos.
Here’s the notice in the British Journal of Nutrition for “Molecular mechanism of green microalgae, Dunaliella salina, involved in attenuating balloon injury-induced neointimal formation”: Continue reading Cell line mixup causes retraction of paper on blood vessel damage
The journal Higher Education Policy has retracted an article it published last year by a scholar in Ethiopia whose grasp of publishing policy seems pretty shaky.
The article, “Financing Higher Education in Ethiopia: Analysis of Cost-Sharing Policy and its Implementation,” which appeared online in August 2012, was by Sewale Abate Ayalew, of Bahir Dar University College of Business and Economics.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Cost-sharing paper that shared too much with other works earns retraction
Here’s a good example of a retraction done the right way (we think).
The Journal of the American Chemical Society has retracted — at the behest of the principal investigator — a 2008 article by a group of researchers whose subsequent studies undermined their confidence in the validity of their initial findings.
The article was titled “Cooperative melting in caged dimers of rigid small molecule DNA-hybrids,” and it came from the lab of SonBinh Nguyen, of Northwestern University. As the paper’s abstract stated:
Continue reading We know why the caged dimers sing: They’re being retracted
Yesterday we reported on the retraction for data misuse and plagiarism of a 21-year-old paper on sex and female cancer patients. Turns out we missed a couple of rather interesting details about the authors of the pulled article.
One tidbit, for example, is that one of them, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, is science royalty, having been a member of a team that won the 2000 Ig Nobel prize in medicine. Their heralded study, “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal,” published in 1999 in the BMJ: An inside-the-MRI look at the human body having sex. Continue reading Authors of retracted sex paper won Ig Nobel for MRI study of coitus — and had another retraction
Leukemia & Lymphoma has retracted 2004 paper by a group of authors in Mexico after concluding that, well, the article never should have been accepted to begin with.
The article, “Adjuvant radiotherapy in stage IV diffuse large cell lymphoma improves outcome,” came from oncologists at the National Medical Center. Its abstract (still available on Medline) states: Continue reading Lacking “scientific and analytical rigor,” 8-year-old lymphoma paper falls to retraction