Eric Smart, who as we reported in November was sanctioned by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) for faking dozens of images in ten papers and seven grants over the past decade, has had his first retraction.
Here’s the December 24 notice, from PNAS: Continue reading First retraction for Eric Smart, who faked dozens of images, appears in PNAS
A group of neuroscientists has retracted a paper published earlier this last year in Diabetes after realizing that a figure that took up a whole page of the paper may not have been quite right.
Here’s the notice for “Blockade of receptor for advanced glycation end products in a model of type 1 diabetic leukoencephalopathy”: Continue reading Authors retract Diabetes paper after submitting it “without knowledge of inherent errors”
A coding switcharoo caused a paper Society & Natural Resources to be retracted. But the authors say that not all is lost, since correcting the data gave them a better understanding of how the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fines companies that pollute in poor and minority neighborhoods.
The retraction notice reads: Continue reading Paper on “evidence for environmental racism” in EPA polluter fines retracted for coding error
Here’s an odd good news/bad news tale from the pages of Industrial Crops and Products. The journal is reinstating a 2011 paper it mistakenly retracted. But, it’s retracting another article from the same author, who tried to grow two peas in the same pod (or something like that).
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Publisher error leads to retraction, then reinstatement, in agriculture journal
You’d think this sort of thing would be, well, obvious to the editors of a journal called Pattern Recognition Letters — could a fox get away with publishing in Henhouse News? — but a group of Lithuanian researchers managed to get a duplicate article into the pages of PRL.
The paper, titled “Application of Bayes linear discriminant functions in image classification,” appeared in the February 2011 issue of PRL. But a very similar version already had been published in a special meeting issue of another journal, Procedia Environmental Sciences. Both are Elsevier titles.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Seeing double in Pattern Recognition Letters leads to retraction
A group of cancer researchers formerly centered at Johns Hopkins have retracted two more studies. The previous two retracted papers — one of which was the focus of a lawsuit — were about prostate cancer, while the new retractions are of papers about colon cancer.
Here’s the notice for one paper: Continue reading Retractions three and four for Hopkins cancer biomarker group
The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has sanctioned a former Texas Tech postdoc for using data that had actually been generated before he joined the lab in a paper as if it were new.
Shuang-Qing Zhang, according to today’s announcement by the ORI, “engaged in research misconduct by the falsification and fabrication of plagiarized data” in a paper he claimed to have written with his supervisor, Reza Mehvar, “Determination of dextra-methylprednisolone conjugate with glycine linker in rat plasma and liver by high-performance liquid chromatography and its application in pharmacokinetics,” first published online in Biomedical Chromatography in 2009. [see update at end of post]
The work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant R01 GM069869. The ORI found that Zhang had: Continue reading ORI sanctions former Texas Tech postdoc for falsification, fabrication, plagiarism
Emerging Infectious Diseases, a CDC journal, is retracting a 2010 paper about swine flu by a group of Minnesota researchers who acknowledged misinterpreting their results.
The study, a letter titled “Triple Reassortant Swine Influenza A (H3N2) Virus in Waterfowl,” claimed to shed new light on how flu viruses might jump between species: Continue reading Paper on how swine flu might spread to birds retracted for error
A group of smoking researchers — no, not scientists who are on fire; scientists who study the effects of tobacco smoke — has retracted a 2009 article after deciding that they were no longer “satisfied with the quality of the data.”
The paper, “Cigarette Smoke–induced Oxidative/Nitrosative Stress Impairs VEGF- and Fluid Shear Stress–Mediated Signaling in Endothelial Cells,” came from the lab of Irfan Rahman, a lung disease expert at the University of Rochester. It appeared online in 2009 in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, which will be familiar to readers watching the case of Dipak Das.
As the notice explains: Continue reading Scientists retract paper because they’re “not satisfied with the quality of some of the data”
The journal Environmental Entomology (that’s insects, not words) is retracting a 2010 paper on a sugarcane-loving borer insect by a group from south Florida.
The article, “Life Table Studies of Elasmopalpus lignosellus (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) on Sugarcane,” came from the Everglades Research & Education Center, an arm of the University of Florida.
According to the notice: Continue reading Sweet nothings: Buggy data force retraction of sugarcane pest paper