Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents has retracted a 2015 review article about natural fighters of cancer stem cells for reproducing “content to a high degree of similarity without appropriate attribution or acknowledgement” from a handful of papers.
Although the editor and publisher pulled the paper, they did so with the cooperation of the authors, according to the retraction note: Continue reading Paper on natural ways to fight cancer stem cells nixed for plagiarism
How should scientists think about papers that have undergone what appears to be a cursory peer review? Perhaps the papers were reviewed in a day — or less — or simply green-lighted by an editor, without an outside look. That’s a question Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford University autism researcher, asked herself when she noticed some troubling trends in four autism journals.
Recently, Bishop sparked a firestorm when she wrote several blog posts arguing that these four autism journals had a serious problem. For instance, she found that Johnny Matson, then-editor of Research in Developmental Disabilities and Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, had an unusually high rate of citing his own research – 55% of his citations are to his own papers, according to Bishop. Matson also published a lot in his own journals – 10% of the papers published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders since Matson took over in 2007 have been his. Matson’s prodigious self-citation in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders was initially pointed out by autism researcher Michelle Dawson, as noted in Bishop’s original post.
Short peer reviews of a day or less were also common. Matson no longer edits the journals, both published by Elsevier.
Bishop noted similar findings at Developmental Neurorehabilitation and Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, where the editors (and Matson) frequently published in each others’ journals, and they often had short peer reviews: The median time for Matson’s papers in Developmental Neurorehabilitation between 2010 and 2014 was a day, and many were accepted the day they were submitted, says Bishop.
Although this behavior may seem suspect, it wasn’t necessarily against the journals’ editorial policies. This is the peer review policy at RIDD:
Continue reading Poll: What to do when peer review feels inadequate?
The Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy has retracted a 2014 paper by a group of South Korean researchers after determining that the authors had doubled up on their publishing odds by submitting the manuscript to a competing journal.
The article was titled “A comparative study of low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with or without chemical peeling using Jessner’s solution in melasma patients,” and it purported to find that:
This study suggests Jessner’s peel is a safe and effective method in the early course of treatment for melasma when combined with low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser.
Continue reading Duplicate submission forces retraction of derm laser paper
The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of pediatric gut researchers in Naples, Italy, who seemed to have had a visceral reaction to using their own words.
The paper, “Composition and roles of intestinal microbiota in children,” sought to
provide an update of the advantages of new-generation molecular diagnostics to study the diversity of intestinal microflora and to evaluate its alteration in human diseases.
The paper has been cited five times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Near “word-to-word” similarities topple microflora paper
A duo of former University of Queensland researchers have had a third article retracted following an investigation into 92 papers.
In September, Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood had a paper in the European Journal of Neurology retracted. Earlier this month, the same happened to a paper in Aphasiology.
The retraction announced by the university today is for a 2013 paper in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
Here’s the notice, which is brief and behind a paywall: Continue reading University of Queensland investigation leads to third retraction
A neurosurgeon in the UK has lost his 2013 paper on spinal surgery in the British Journal of Neurosurgery for doing what appears to have been an end-run around the folks that did the work.
The article, “The management of spinal dural fistulas: a 13-year retrospective analysis,” was written by Denosshan Sri, of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge.
Here’s the abstract:
Continue reading Neurosurgery journal retracts spine paper for lack of attribution
Climacteric is retracting a 2013 article by a group of researchers in Seoul who used data from a paper by another duo of Korean scientists also published in, you guessed it, Climacteric.
The paper, “Different bone mineral density in cervical and endometrial cancer,” came from a group of Soonchunhyang University and was published online late last year. It purported to look at the association between gynecologic cancers and bone mineral density: Continue reading Bone-headed move? Authors of cancer-skeleton paper copy from paper in same journal
A rheumatology researcher in France is retracting a paper for errors in several sentences.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Odanacatib for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis, a paper originally published in October in Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy:
Unfortunately, due to an honest error from the author, a small portion of this otherwise reliable published article contains clinically inaccurate data. The publisher and author agree to retract the paper pending correction.
The author of the paper, Roland Chapurlat, tells us: Continue reading A “small portion of this otherwise reliable published article contains clinically inaccurate data”
A pair of authors from Italy has retracted their 2012 article in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine for including chunks of text with a “high degree of similarity” from other published sources. But rest assured: the authors, we’re told, didn’t intend to do so.
The article, “Central venous catheterization and thrombosis in newborns: update on diagnosis and management,” appeared in a supplemental issue of the journal covering the proceedings of the XVIII Congress of the Italian Society of Neonatology.
According to the retraction notice (which, we’re told, was inadvertently behind a pay wall until we asked for it): Continue reading Virtually verbatim text earns retraction of neonate paper, gives authors a pass
The journal Clinical Research and Regulatory Affairs has retracted a 2012 article on over-the-counter drugs by a trio of pharmacy researchers in India who decided to “reproduce content to a high degree of similarity” from other sources.
Here’s how the retraction notice puts it: Continue reading Paper on over-the-counter drugs goes over the line in borrowing text