Category: freely available

Updated: Ski resort paper hits a (media) mogul and gets retracted

With temperatures at Retraction Watch’s New York HQ threatening to break 100 degrees today — that’s nearly 38 degrees Celsius for those of you in the rest of the world — what better way to take our minds off the heat than by writing about than skiing?

Lucky for us, the author of a paper in the Journal of Maps about new ways to create ski resort maps — aka the “Breckenridge schematic map” — has retracted it. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Updated: Ski resort paper hits a (media) mogul and gets retracted

JPET corrects Janssen antidepressant paper after neuroscience blogger notes errors

Are drug company R&D departments reading blogs?

In a recent paper, “Translational evaluation of JNJ-18038683, a 5-HT7 receptor antagonist, on REM sleep and in major depressive disorder,” researchers with New Jersey-based Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. tested whether a potential drug code-named JNJ-18038683 that binds to a receptor linked to depression could actually help patients.

Turns out, the drug was a flop, but Continue reading JPET corrects Janssen antidepressant paper after neuroscience blogger notes errors

JPET peeves: Paper withdrawn after drug company won’t disclose chemical structure

A group of researchers at the drug company ChemoCentryx is withdrawing a 2012 paper in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics over failure to appropriately identify the molecule they describe in the article.

The withdrawal notice tells the story: Continue reading JPET peeves: Paper withdrawn after drug company won’t disclose chemical structure

Serial plagiarizers banned from dermatology journal forever

Last August, we brought you the news that the Indian Journal of Dermatology had banned a group of Tunisian researchers from publishing in the journal for five years, because they had plagiarized in a 2009 study.

Well, the journal’s editors found another case in which the authors have plagiarized, and now they’re banned from the journal for good. Here’s the notice, which describes both cases: Continue reading Serial plagiarizers banned from dermatology journal forever

Tell-tale hearts: Cardiology journals retract redundant articles

The European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery has retracted a 2007 article by Chinese researchers after the senior author decided he liked the data so nice he’d publish them twice. And he appears to have done so without the knowledge of the corresponding author.

Here’s the notice for the paper, titled “Open-heart surgery in patients with liver cirrhosis”: Continue reading Tell-tale hearts: Cardiology journals retract redundant articles

Shikeagi Kato, who resigned post in March, retracts Nature paper

Shikeagi Kato, an endocrinologist formerly of the University of Tokyo who resigned on March 31 amidst an investigation into his work, has retracted another paper, this one in Nature.

Here’s the notice for “DNA demethylation for hormone-induced transcriptional derepression,” which was the subject of a correction last October: Continue reading Shikeagi Kato, who resigned post in March, retracts Nature paper

Circulation retracts four papers by author who misled on IRB approval

Circulation has retracted four articles by a pediatric cardiologist in Japan who failed to obtain ethics approval for the studies in question but evidently lied about it to the journal.

The researcher, Hideaki Senzaki, of Saitama Medical University, is a highly-published investigator who trained for a time with at Johns Hopkins.

According to the Circulation notice: Continue reading Circulation retracts four papers by author who misled on IRB approval

Chemist Craig Hill, author of JACS and Science papers, explains the retractions

Last week, we reported that Craig Hill, a prominent chemist at Emory University, and his colleagues at six other institutions are retracting three papers they published in the mid-2000s, two in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and one in Science.

We have now spoken with Hill, who walked us through the history of the research. According to Hill, the international team of researchers, after “unusually extensive experiments” felt they had enough evidence to publish their original articles

but all authors (and others) remained skeptical given the unprecedented nature of these compounds.

Hill’s lab continued to conduct experiments and probe the original data after the publications, he said. (Hill wrote a piece for Nature in 2008 explaining the significance of the research, which, among other things, might lead to better ways of harnessing solar energy.) Continue reading Chemist Craig Hill, author of JACS and Science papers, explains the retractions

Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes

Researchers deleted more genes than they bargained for in a Drosophila strain, a mistake that resulted in a retraction of a paper from 2007.

Ron Wides, a biologist specializing in pattern development at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and colleagues have retracted a paper published in Mechanisms of Development after his lab found that their technique to delete the Ten-a gene ended up deleting other nearby genes, too.

It was deletions of other genes, and not Ten-a, that killed the fruit flies, Wides concluded. His group had also concluded, erroneously, that Ten-a is what’s known as a “pair-rule” gene. Fruit fly embryos develop in stacked segments, like tubes of Pringles; pair-rule genes guide the development of alternating segments. Those other loci, and not Ten-a, caused lethality and caused the flies to develop improperly early,  Wides concluded.

The retraction reads in full: Continue reading Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes

JACS, Science retracting three papers from leading Emory chemist Craig Hill

The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and Science are retracting three papers by Craig Hill and colleagues which, we’re told, have been the focus of intense scrutiny within the field since they first appeared in the mid-2000. Hill is an internationally renowned expert in catalysis who has won a slew of awards for his work.

JACS has acted first, issuing two notices recently about the papers it published. The first notice, for 2005’s “A Palladium-Oxo Complex. Stabilization of This Proposed Catalytic Intermediate by an Encapsulating Polytungstate Ligand,” states: Continue reading JACS, Science retracting three papers from leading Emory chemist Craig Hill