The authors of a letter describing the synthesis of ketonitrones have retracted it, after new data showed that they incorrectly reported the product structures and the reaction mechanism.
We’re not sure what exactly went wrong with the original data in the letter, “Transition-Metal-Catalyzed Ring Expansion of Diazocarbonylated Cyclic N-Hydroxylamines: A New Approach to Cyclic Ketonitrones,” published in Organic Letters.
Here’s the reaction that the paper reported, from the abstract:
A nearly ten-year-long series of investigations into a pair of plant physiologists who received millions in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation has resulted in debarments of less than two years for each of the researchers.
The NSF Office of Inspector General recently posted its close-out report on its decision and a review of the University’s investigation, which had recommended a total of eight retractions or corrections. Although the investigator’s names have been redacted, the text of retractions and corrections quoted in the report corresponds to papers by Continue reading NSF investigation of high-profile plant retractions ends in two debarments
Environmental Science & Technology has issued a correction for a March 2015 paper on methane contamination from gas wells after learning that the authors failed to disclose funding from Chesapeake Energy Corp., a major U.S. energy producer.
Three chemists at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in India have retracted a paper from the Journal of Organic Chemistry because the “incorrect files were inadvertently used.”
The article, “Room-Temperature Cu(II)-Catalyzed Chemo- and Regioselective Ortho-Nitration of Arenes via C–H Functionalization,” described a protocol to perform nitration — the addition of nitro groups onto an organic compound — using an inexpensive copper catalyst.
A team of chemists at Hunan University and Zhejiang Shuyang Chemical Company in China have retracted a paper from the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data after “inconsistencies with the literature” led them to discover “errors” in the way the data were reported.
According to the corresponding author Qinbo Wang, in December 2014, Robert Chirico, an associate editor at the journal, contacted Wang with concerns that the paper’s data were an anomaly.
Wang then went through the original notes with the first author, and realized that the data reported in the paper didn’t match the experimental results. The lab then conducted further experiments, and discovered that multiple corrections would be necessary. They were, as Wang told us: Continue reading Reporting errors sink chem paper on liquid-liquid equilibrium
The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has retracted three articles that had earned expressions of concern by chemistry researchers who were under investigation at the University of Texas, Austin.
ACS Catalysis has retracted a 2012 research letter from a chemistry lab that discovered an error in their experiments.
According to last author Rory Waterman at the University of Vermont, an undetected reaction caused his lab to mistakenly mischaracterize the products of an iridium catalyst. The diligence of a graduate student brought it all to light, he noted: “In short, it was the ability of one of my group members to be a very good scientist.”
The letter, titled “High Activity and Selectivity for Silane Dehydrocoupling by an Iridium Catalyst,” was published in February. It has only accumulated 5 citations, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
The editors of ACS’s Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data have sunk a paper on halogenated alkanes after realizing that “a significant amount” of the data was “inaccurate,” thereby “invalidating” the paper.
Two researchers who already had three expressions of concern under their belts have five more, plus a retraction.
Kelly Wiggins and Christopher Bielawski share authorship on all the papers in question. After the first set of EoCs, Bielawski, at the time a PI at UT Austin, told Chemistry and Engineering News that a “former lab member” had admitted to faking the data. The recent retraction indicates that University of Texas at Austin’s Office of Research Integrity formally investigated the lab, and determined that Bielawski was telling the truth about a former lab member being to blame.
Bielawski has since taken a post at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. He told us that move was unrelated to anything that happened at UT Austin, but declined to answer other questions. Wiggins got a postdoc at the University of Illinois, which an Illinois spokesperson confirmed lasted from July 1 2013 to January 22 2014; we’re waiting to hear back on our question about whether her departure had anything to do with misconduct.
