Category: freely available

Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th

Screen Shot 2015-09-16 at 12.12.13 AM

We’ve found two recent retractions and an expression of concern for Joachim Boldt, former prominent anesthesiologist and currently Retraction Watch leaderboard’s 2nd place titleholder. He now has 94 retractions.

One of the retracted articles contains falsified data, along with a researcher who didn’t agree to be a co-author, according to an investigation by the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where Boldt used to work. The expression of concern is regarding some questionable data. The other new retraction is actually one of 88 papers that a group of editors agreed to retract back in 2011, after they were “unable to verify” approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the studies.

One of those 88 papers, we’ve discovered, has still has not been retracted. According to an editor at the journal, they haven’t removed it because one of Boldt’s co-authors has threatened them with legal action. Continue reading Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th

Authors pull Science paper on molecular wires for “inappropriate data handling”

pic.mag.current-issueThis week’s issue of Science includes a retraction of a highly cited paper about manipulating the current in a string of molecules with a magnet, after an investigation by the co-authors revealed “inappropriate data handling” by the first author.

According to the note, the co-authors’ suspicions arose when they tried to follow-up on the data. Following a “thorough investigation,” they concluded that first author Rabindra N. Mahato had handled the data in such a way that they could no longer trust the conclusions. In the end, Mahato agreed to the retraction.

Here’s more from the note: Continue reading Authors pull Science paper on molecular wires for “inappropriate data handling”

Authors “did not have permission” to use pesticide data

10661An environmental journal is retracting an article about the risks of pesticides to groundwater after determining it contained data that “the authors did not have permission (implicit or explicit) to publish.”

According to the retraction note in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, the paper said the data came from a non-author’s PhD thesis, but it’s not there. Those mysterious data were used to validate a model for pesticide exposures, described in an excerpt from the abstract:  Continue reading Authors “did not have permission” to use pesticide data

Urologist makes what he calls “clarifications” to multiple articles

Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 10.22.32 AMWe have discovered several errata for a New York City urologist, including in one paper that previously inspired one of our favorite headlines.

The latest development is pretty straightforward: Ashutosh K. Tewari has issued errata to multiple papers in two journals that note changes to some data points. But the backstory has some twists and turns, so you may need to read this one carefully.

We’ll start with the paper that might be familiar to eagle-eyed readers, on incontinence after surgery: “Effect of a Risk- Grade of Nerve-sparing Technique on Early Return of Continence After Robot-assisted Laparoscopic Radical Prostatectomy.” It was published in European Urology in 2012, and has been cited 21 times, according Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the correction note (paywalled  — tsk, tsk):

Continue reading Urologist makes what he calls “clarifications” to multiple articles

Cochrane withdraws review on zinc for colds for data concerns

Cochrane_LogoThe Cochrane Library has withdrawn a 2013 systematic review on zinc’s ability to fight the common cold.

Cochrane often marks reviews “withdrawn” once new evidence emerges that renders them out of date — but in this case, the review was flagged while the editors investigate issues “regarding the calculation and analysis of data.”

Here’s the notice.

Continue reading Cochrane withdraws review on zinc for colds for data concerns

Journal bans authors of duplicated asthma paper

22A common ailment known as duplication has taken down a paper about a common fungus and asthma.

Aspergillus spores are often ubiquitous yet harmless, but can irritate people whose lungs aren’t in top working order. Duplication, on the other hand, is more universally deadly. The editors of The Pan African Medical Journal told us that, in addition to the retraction, there were personal consequences for the authors:  Continue reading Journal bans authors of duplicated asthma paper

Mystery: PLOS One seeks investigation after publishing two papers with “substantial overlap”

Screen Shot 2015-10-01 at 4.27.21 PMPLOS One has retracted one of two cancer papers with “substantial overlap” that were reviewed simultaneously by different editors.

This one’s a bit of a mystery — neither of the papers share an author, and no authors share institutions. Once the editors discovered the overlap, they contacted the authors. One group of authors provided the requested documentation for the experiments. The other did not — so the editors retracted that article, even though it was published months before the other one.

In the meantime, the editors have asked the authors’ institutions investigate how the articles — which contain entire identical sentences, and some extremely similar figures — were put together. According to a statement from the editors:

Continue reading Mystery: PLOS One seeks investigation after publishing two papers with “substantial overlap”

There’s “no evidence” research was conducted at all in retracted cancer paper

cov200h (1)To one reader of a paper on a nerve cancer, the researchers, based at a hospital in China, seemed to have found a very large number of cases of a rare cancer to study. That observation triggered an investigation into the paper that led to its retraction — and the concern that the authors in the paper never did the research at all.

The authors say they recruited 156 patients who had a particular kind of cancer that affects the tissue around nerves, known as malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors. For context on how rare that is: Other researchers found a mere 1,182 new cases over a nearly four-decade period in the U.S. The study, according to the methods section of the paper, was supposedly done with patients who had a specific type of the disease, and who were

consecutively recruited from Wuhan Union Hospital, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan (Hubei, China) between July 2000 and November 2012

According to the retraction note for “Common genetic variants in the microRNA biogenesis pathway are associated with malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor risk in a Chinese population,” the hospital where the work was done never treated all of those patients:

Continue reading There’s “no evidence” research was conducted at all in retracted cancer paper

Investigation ends in 6th retraction for Voinnet

PLOS PathogensA sixth paper co-authored by plant researcher Olivier Voinnet has been retracted by PLOS Pathogens “following an investigation into concerns.”

The investigation found “several band duplications” in one figure provided by fifth author, Patrice Dunoyer, who took it from “the Master thesis of a former student working under his supervision, without the prior consultation or consent of this student,” according to the notice. There was also an incorrect “loading control” in another figure, attributed to first author Raphael Sansregret and last author Kamal Bouarab. 

Voinnet and Bouarab, the study’s corresponding authors, took full responsibility for “the publication of this erroneous paper.”

Although investigators found that the raw data in the duplicated figure backed up its conclusions, “given the nature and extent of data manipulation,” the authors asked the journal to retract the paper .

Continue reading Investigation ends in 6th retraction for Voinnet

“Irresolvable authorship dispute” leads to retraction of tropical disease paper

Microbiology AustraliaA paper on schistosomiasis, a tropical disease spread by parasitic worms that live in freshwater snails, has been pulled because of an “irresolvable authorship dispute.”

Microbiology Australia published the retraction earlier this month in an agreement with the editors and the authors. Unfortunately, the notice doesn’t provide many details and that’s pretty much all we know.

Here’s the notice in full:

Continue reading “Irresolvable authorship dispute” leads to retraction of tropical disease paper