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”
A contested retraction in Stem Cells and Development has left the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) graduate student who fought for it in limbo, uncertain if he will earn his PhD. And many of those who didn’t want the paper retracted have a significant financial interest in a company whose work was promoted by the research — despite any lack of disclosure in the now-retracted paper.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Stem cell retraction leaves grad student in limbo, reveals tangled web of industry-academic ties
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
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity is investigating work done at a Caltech lab after researchers there couldn’t replicate it, and retracted a paper based on the findings.
Here’s the notice, which ran this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Continue reading ORI investigating work from Caltech lab as PNAS paper is retracted
Here at Retraction Watch, we’ve covered retractions for misconduct, journal errors, editorial system hacking and even no particular reason.
And that’s just in the last week.
However, we’ve identified a new reported reason: carelessness. A paper in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry claimed to show how a tiny RNA causes fat cells to die.
Instead, the paper died.
Turned out that rather than describe previously published data, the authors say they inadvertently included a figure that had already appeared in another paper.
The retraction for “miR-598 induces replicative senescence in human adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cells via silent information regulator 1,” reads, in full: Continue reading RNA paper retracted for “carelessness in including some of the figures”