Category: freely available

Reason behind opaque Antioxidants & Redox Signaling retraction notice revealed

There’s an unhelpful retraction notice online in the journal Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, a Mary Ann Liebert publication. The paper, “Inhibition of LXRalpha-dependent steatosis and oxidative injury by liquiritigenin, a licorice flavonoid, as mediated with Nrf2 activation,” has been removed from the site, except for the abstract, which now has this in front of it:

THIS WORK HAS BEEN RETRACTED BY THE AUTHORS

That, as we’ve said before in exasperation, certainly clears things right up.

But we found out the reason for the retraction from Paul S. Brookes, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Here’s the letter he sent the editors of Antioxidants & Redox Signaling and Free Radical Biology and Medicine, an Elsevier title: Continue reading Reason behind opaque Antioxidants & Redox Signaling retraction notice revealed

Materials paper retracted after post-doc’s plagiarism

The Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine has retracted a 2011 paper after it was determined that the first author, then a post-doc at the University of Michigan, had plagiarized from another publication.

The first author of the retracted article, “Functionalization of titanium based metallic biomaterials for implant applications,” was the post-doc, Rahul Bhola, who received his PhD from the Colorado School of Mines and went to Michigan to work in the lab of Catherine Krull.

Fruit of that relationship was the paper — and here’s how that worked out: Continue reading Materials paper retracted after post-doc’s plagiarism

Retraction comes as death of PI leads to lost records

The Journal of Experimental Medicine has retracted a 2011 article after the principal investigator’s home institution suggested that the PI might have manipulated his data. Complicating matters, the PI in this case died two weeks after the paper appeared and his notes have gone missing — making an affirmative declaration of fraud or honest error difficult.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction comes as death of PI leads to lost records

Physics retraction as rogue authors add six colleagues to a paper they didn’t write

Forged authorship — in which researchers add the names of people who’ve had nothing to do with a paper, either to boost its chance of being published, pay tribute (in a misguided way), or both — has become a common theme at Retraction Watch. But we’re pretty sure we haven’t seen a case involving as many faked authors as a now-retracted paper in Europhysics Letters. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Physics retraction as rogue authors add six colleagues to a paper they didn’t write

Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists

About two years ago, Marc Duflot, a research engineer at Cenaero, heard a disturbing tale from a collaborator. The collaborator, it seemed, had been asked to review a paper submitted to a journal, and noticed that it was remarkably similar to a paper by Duflot. Duflot’s collaborator recommended that the journal reject the paper, and it did. Duflot tells Retraction Watch (we added a link to the paper in question):

Then, several months later, I discovered that the…paper had been submitted and accepted in Meccanica. If I remember correctly, I discovered it by searching the web with Google Scholar with terms related to my field of expertise.

So in January 2010, Duflot wrote to the editors of Meccanica to alert them to the plagiarism by the authors, M. Garzon and D. Sargoso of the University of Madrid. He concluded his email:

I am deeply disappointed by the fraudulent behaviour of M. Garzon and D. Sargoso. Strangely, I cannot find any mention of these two people on the web neither of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Madrid. Otherwise, I would have reported this to the head of their department.

An editorial assistant got back to him: Continue reading Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists

Hormesis? Information scant in unhelpful retraction notice (Psst: It was plagiarism)

The latest issue of Dose-Response, the official journal of the International Dose-Response Society, has one of the uninformative retraction notices we’ve come to hate for their inscrutability: Continue reading Hormesis? Information scant in unhelpful retraction notice (Psst: It was plagiarism)

Expression of Concern for a Bulfone-Paus paper

Retraction Watch readers may recall the story of Silvia Bulfone-Paus, who has been forced to retract 12 papers and has another under review at Blood. All of that scrutiny came after an investigation by her home institution, Germany’s Borstel Institute, that found evidence of image manipulation.

The latest development is perhaps no surprise. It concerns a review Bulfone-Paus and her colleagues published in BioEssays in 2006. Here’s the Expression of Concern, which was published online in July but just came our attention (we’ve added links to our coverage of specific retractions): Continue reading Expression of Concern for a Bulfone-Paus paper

Ob-gyn journal pulls pregnancy test paper for undeclared conflict of interest, other problems

The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG) as a remarkable retraction notice in its November issue — the likes of which we haven’t seen before.

A little background: Earlier this year, Laurence Cole, an academic obstetrics specialist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, published a paper in the AJOG looking at the wide variability in the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, during pregnancy (we’d link to the article, but the journal has pulled it, so here’s the abstract on Medline).

Cole runs — or did run until recently, more on that in a moment — the USA hCG Reference Service at the university, which purports to be the only lab in the world that can measure all forms of hCG. He has published extensively in this area of research, with at least 125 papers to his name on the subject, according to a Medline search. One of his websites puts the figure at 246.

So Cole was definitely a known quantity to the journal editors when he submitted his manuscript and when it was published online in February of this year. That’ll be more important in a bit. But first, the retraction notice: Continue reading Ob-gyn journal pulls pregnancy test paper for undeclared conflict of interest, other problems

A flying what? Symbiosis retracts paper claiming new species arise from accidental mating

In 2009, Donald Williamson made what many biologists said was an extraordinary claim: The reason caterpillars become butterflies is that two different species accidentally mated with one another. As Brendan Borrell explained at the time in Scientific American: Continue reading A flying what? Symbiosis retracts paper claiming new species arise from accidental mating

Concerns over language in PLoS One autism paper lead to brief withdrawal and correction

via Wikimedia

On September 28, PLoS One published a paper, “The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence II: What about Asperger Syndrome?”

But rather than celebrate another publication for her CV, one of the authors, Michelle Dawson, of Centre d’Excellence en Troubles Envahissants du Développement de l’Université de Montréal (CETEDUM) in Montréal, wasn’t happy. The PLoS One editors had made some changes she didn’t like. And she let everyone on Twitter know: Continue reading Concerns over language in PLoS One autism paper lead to brief withdrawal and correction