Category: karger

Authors retract Digestion paper for “unacceptably high number of errors”

A group of South Korean researchers has decided to withdraw a paper they recently published in the journal Digestion because it was filled with mistakes.

The paper, “Endoscopy-Based Decision Is Sufficient for Predicting Completeness in Lateral Resection Margin in Colon Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection,” was published earlier this year (and online in late 2011) by a group in Seoul. But according to the retraction notice:

Continue reading Authors retract Digestion paper for “unacceptably high number of errors”

Plagiarism leads to retraction of liver cancer paper

The journal Digestion has a retraction notice that’s, well, an amusing morsel.

At issue was a 2011 paper on a biomarker for liver cancer by a group of Turkish authors who plagiarized from the work of others.

Here’s the notice for the article, titled “Diagnostic and Prognostic Validity of Golgi Protein 73 in Hepatocellular Carcinoma“: Continue reading Plagiarism leads to retraction of liver cancer paper

Second retraction for former SUNY Upstate department chair found guilty of misconduct

Last week, we covered the case of Michael W. Miller, a former department chair at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate who was forced to retract a paper in the Journal of Neurochemistry after a university investigation found he had committed misconduct.

We figured more retractions might be on the way, so we weren’t surprised when a commenter informed us earlier today of “very interesting and odd retraction letter.” Miller has had at least one other retraction, it turns out, this one in Developmental Neuroscience for 2009’s “Lability of Neuronal Lineage Decisions Is Revealed by Acute Exposures to Ethanol.” Here’s the notice, published online on January 19: Continue reading Second retraction for former SUNY Upstate department chair found guilty of misconduct

ME-Coli: Germ paper retracted after mentor accuses authors of idea theft

Plagiarism can involve the theft of words, and we’ve covered plenty of such cases (like this one). But here’s a case of what appears to be more wholesale lifting of everything from ideas to assays.

The Journal of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology (JMMB), a Karger title, has retracted an October 2010 paper, “Characterization of Methyltransferase Properties of Escherichia coli YabC Protein with an Enzyme-Coupled Colorimetric Assay,” by Jingsong Gu and Chunjiang Ye. Both of those scientists are in the department of biotechnology at the University of Jinan in China.

Gu had trained as a postdoctoral research in the laboratory of biologist Elaine Newman, of Concordia University in Montreal who describes herself as a “long time friend” of E. coli. (As they say, with friends like that, who needs enemas?)

The retraction notice — a trio of remarkably revealing letters — begins with an apologia from the authors: Continue reading ME-Coli: Germ paper retracted after mentor accuses authors of idea theft