Last October, Anica Klockars, a neuroscience researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a colleague published a controversial comment in the journal Small GTPases, a Landes Bioscience title.
The title of the letter was meant to provoke: “Scientific yellow journalism.”
As the authors wrote: Continue reading Charge of “scientific yellow journalism” has supervisor seeing red, leads to retraction
A group of cancer researchers in Argentina has retracted a paper on the p300 protein in breast cancer that appeared in Experimental and Molecular Pathology.
The article, titled “Intracellular distribution of p300 and its differential recruitment to aggresomes in breast cancer,” was published in 2010 by Maria E. Fermento and colleagues. It has been cited 11 times since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading The “unintentionality” of being leads to nothingness for paper on protein’s role in cancer
A paper about a high-profile human fossil has been mysteriously removed from the journal that published it just two weeks ago.
Here’s the notice for “The oldest human fossil in Europe dated to ca. 1.4 Ma at Orce (Spain),” originally published on March 5: Continue reading Toothless wonder? Paper on “oldest human fossil in Europe” temporarily removed from journal’s site
We have poked fun at Pattern Recognition Letters before for failing to catch blatant plagiarism. We probably should have held off on those jokes for this post.
A group of IT researchers from India has suffered the retraction of a paper in PRL for heavily basing the piece on at least four previous papers written by one of the co-authors without proper attribution (not that such attribution likely would have absolved the sin).
The paper, titled “A robust kernelized intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm in segmentation of noisy medical images,” was published in January of this year by Prabhjot Kaur and colleagues.
Here’s the retraction notice:
Continue reading “Considerable overlap” leads to retraction of medical imaging paper
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University and a friend of the blog, has corrected a 2008 paper in the blunt way you’d expect him to.
Here’s the notice in the Annals of Applied Statistics:
In the paper, “Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy?” AOAS 2 (2), 536-549 (2008), by Andrew Gelman and Cexun Jeffrey Cai, because of a data coding error on one of the variables, all our analysis of social issues is incorrect. Thus, arguably, all of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise. We thank Yang Yang Hu for discovering this error and demonstrating its importance.
In a post called “Retraction watch” — hey now! — Gelman writes: Continue reading “[A]ll of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise”: Correction of paper on Democrats’ economic policy
Rao Adibhatla, a University of Wisconsin scientist who was found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have faked data in two papers, has had one of those studies retracted.
Here’s the notice for “CDP-choline significantly restores phosphatidylcholine levels by differentially affecting phospholipase A2 and CTP: phosphocholine cytidylyltransferase after stroke,” by Adibhatla and a number of colleagues in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC): Continue reading U Wisconsin neuroscientist who faked images has first paper retracted
An immunologist found by a former employer to have committed misconduct in more than 20 papers has had another paper retracted.
Here’s the notice for “Refining siRNA in vivo transfection: Silencing SPHK1 reveals its key role in C5a-induced inflammation in vivo,” by Alirio Melendez and colleagues in The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology: Continue reading Retraction nine appears for Alirio Melendez
Blood has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Swedish authors, one of whom appears to have misappropriated data from his mentor.
The article, titled “Microparticles are the basic storage units for different proteins in platelet granules,” appeared online in July 2012 and was written by Chi Zhang and Yang Yang, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
But as the retraction notice explains, there was a problem:
The journal Inorganica Chimica Acta has retracted a paper it published earlier this year over an authorship dispute involving the lead researcher and his colleagues in France.
The title of the paper — whose bulk alone gave us a headache — was “Reaction of a bidentate ligands (4,4′-dimethyl 2,2′-bipyridine) with planar-chiral chloro-bridged ruthenium: Synthesis of cis-dicarbonyl[4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-bipyridine- κO1,κO2]{2-[tricarbonyl(η6-phenylene- κC1)chromium]pyridine-κN}ruthenium hexafluorophosphate” — and it purportedly came from a lab in Beirut.
However, as the retraction notice indicates, that’s not quite so:
Continue reading Paper — with longest title ever? — retracted for lack of author approval
What happens when people who study management have to write a retraction notice? This, from Management Learning, regarding a paper by Gordon Müller-Seitz of the Free University of Berlin, suggests one possibility: Continue reading Duplication, aka self-plagiarism, meets management-speak