A 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
PLOS 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:
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
A 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
A 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
Three authors have been banned from journals published by IGM Publication, including the Journal of Medical Science and Clinical Research.
The ban — a relatively infrequent occurrence in publishing — comes after the publisher removed a 2014 article that seems to have merely changed the title and authors of a 2013 article from another journal.
When a tip from a reader pointed to the possibility of duplication between the two articles, Continue reading Publisher bans authors for apparent plagiarism
A correction to a 2011 paper doesn’t change its main conclusion: Hearing song lyrics about violence — “let the bodies hit the floor,” for example — can prompt aggressive behavior, even more so than violent imagery in music videos.
The correction follows an investigation by Macquarie University that found errors in data analysis to be an “honest mistake.”
During the study — “The effect of auditory versus visual violent media exposure on aggressive behaviour: The role of song lyrics, video clips and musical tone,” published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology — the authors measured the effect of violent songs or imagery using the “hot sauce paradigm.” In this model, researchers estimate people’s level of aggression by how much hot sauce they give another person to eat. The study found that, indeed, people who are exposed to violence — particularly, lyrics — give more hot sauce to their neighbors. It has been cited 6 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
One aspect of the paper prompted a tweet from a Dutch journalist: Continue reading Violent songs can lead to spicy food, and other lessons we learned from corrected graphic
A paper on nematode parasites appears to have been infected with a nasty strain of a publishing problem known as fake peer review. By our count, the phenomenon has felled approximately 250 papers in total.
The affected review, “The important role of matrix metalloproteinases in nematode parasites,” explores a type of enzyme secreted by the parasite. Published in Helminthologia, it’s been cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Unfortunately, the retraction note doesn’t give us too many details about how the peer review process was manipulated:
Continue reading “Rigging of the peer-review process” kills parasite paper
The number of so-called “predatory” open-access journals that allegedly sidestep publishing standards in order to make money off of article processing charges has dramatically expanded in recent years, and three-quarters of authors are based in either Asia or Africa, according to a new analysis from BMC Medicine.*
The number of articles published by predatory journals spiked from 53,000 in 2010 to around 420,000 in 2014, appearing in 8,000 active journals. By comparison, some 1.4-2 million papers are indexed in PubMed and similar vetted databases every year.
These types of papers have become a major problem, according to Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver who studies the phenomenon: Continue reading Predatory journals published 400,000 papers in 2014: Report
A scientist who uses imaging to study the eye and brain has lost a major grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
In June, the NIH revised the award for Timothy Duong at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio from $332,500 per year to $0, and included this statement: Continue reading NIH rescinds grant to Texas eye researcher