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Authors retract paper claiming antidepressants prevent suicide

The authors of a study allegedly showing that antidepressants prevent suicide have retracted it over unspecified errors. Here’s the notice:

At the request of the authors and in agreement with the Editor-in-Chief and Wiley-Blackwell, the following article “Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression”. Acta Psychiatr Scand 2010;122:454–460 has been retracted. The retraction has been requested and agreed due to unintentional errors in the analysis of the data presented.

The original paper linked “data on the toxicological detection of antidepressants in 18 922 suicides in Sweden 1992–2003” to “registers of psychiatric hospitalization as well as registers with sociodemographic data.” It found: Continue reading Authors retract paper claiming antidepressants prevent suicide

A non-unanimous retraction in PNAS after authors are “unable to reproduce the data”

A group of authors has retracted a 2009 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after subsequent experiments suggested their original results weren’t holding up.

According to the notice for the paper, which has been cited 8 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading A non-unanimous retraction in PNAS after authors are “unable to reproduce the data”

Hold the broccoli, garlic, and wine: Three Dipak Das retractions appear in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has retracted three papers by Dipak Das, the resveratrol researcher found to have committed more than 100 counts of fraud by the University of Connecticut.

Journal editor James Seiber writes: Continue reading Hold the broccoli, garlic, and wine: Three Dipak Das retractions appear in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

Journal pulls four breast cancer papers for duplication

The journal Breast Cancer: Targets and Therapy, a Dove Medical Press title, has retracted four articles from a group of Indian researchers over what it said were “unacceptable levels” of duplication with other published work. (Such a construction leaves us wondering what might constitute “acceptable levels” of duplication, but that’s for a different post.)

The articles were submitted by Rajeev Singhai, who is listed as being with Grant Medical College and the Sir J J Group of Hospitals, in Mumbai. According to his After College page, Singhai received his PhD in 2011 and is now a research fellow.

As the notice states: Continue reading Journal pulls four breast cancer papers for duplication

Society error leads to published — then retracted — Alzheimer’s abstract from top group

Alzheimer’s & Dementia has retracted a meeting abstract the journal published without the OK of the researchers, a top group from Harvard, who submitted it but withdrew the work before the conference.

That, as they say, might require some unpacking. Maybe this will make things clearer.

Raj Hooli, a graduate student in the lab of Rudolph Tanzi, a leading neuroscientist at Harvard — where he holds the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy endowed chair of neurology — had submitted the abstract, “Genome-wide assessment of copy number variations in early-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” for consideration at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD).

As Tanzi explains: Continue reading Society error leads to published — then retracted — Alzheimer’s abstract from top group

Journal yanks anemia paper over duplicate data

Blood Cells, Molecules, and Diseases (that’s one title) has retracted a 2011 paper, “Comparative proteomics reveals deficiency of NHE-1 (Slc9a1) in RBCs from the beta-adducin knockout mouse model of hemolytic anemia,” after learning from a reader that the data it contained were previously published by a competing publication.

As the notice explains: Continue reading Journal yanks anemia paper over duplicate data

Neuro journal retracts case study with redundant data

If that headline has you scratching your, well, head, we don’t blame you. After all, case studies are, by definition, unique — but not this one.

Neurological Sciences, the official journal of the Italian Society of Neurology, has retracted a 2009 article by a Korean scientist after learning that the manuscript contained elements of a 2007 publication in a different publication.

According to the notice: Continue reading Neuro journal retracts case study with redundant data

Another withdrawal by MD Anderson’s Aggarwal, again for unclear reasons

Bharat B. Aggarwal, the MD Anderson researcher under investigation at his institution over concerns of image manipulation, has withdrawn a second paper, although you’d never know why from the statement.

The notice for the article, “Evidence for the critical roles of NF-κB p65 and specificity proteins in the apoptosis-inducing activity of proteasome inhibitors in leukemia cells,” is pretty minimal: Continue reading Another withdrawal by MD Anderson’s Aggarwal, again for unclear reasons

On second thought: Transplant paper retracted for researcher error

When a group from Saint Louis University published a case report in Pediatric Transplantation on a baby with an unusual infection after kidney transplant surgery, they thought they’d stumbled on a first. At the time they wrote:

[Acalculous candidal cholecystitis] caused by Candida is an uncommon entity usually seen in the critically ill. Here, we present the case of an 18-month-old renal transplant patient who developed candidal AAC during the post-operative period. Previous articles have addressed acalculous cholecystitis secondary to a variety of causes, or addressed a wide variety of Candida infections in the biliary tract, but this is the first discussion of cholecystitis caused by Candida without confounding factors such as biliary calculi or multiple pathogens. After the discussion of our patient’s case, we also reviewed the English-language literature regarding candidal AAC and discussed diagnosis, treatment, and mortality.

A year later, however, the group is walking back their article. A retraction notice in the journal states that: Continue reading On second thought: Transplant paper retracted for researcher error