Figure 1a in a 1998 paper was first flagged on PubPeer in 2016 for image irregularities.
Nature has issued an editorial expression of concern on a paper published 27 years ago — and nearly nine years after learning of an “irregularity” in a figure.
According to the June 18 statement, a figure in the 1998 paper showed duplicated control lanes, with one of them flipped.
Pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis flagged the issue on PubPeer in 2016, and reported the problem to the journal at the same time, Francis told Retraction Watch.
The journal Nature Synthesis has pulled a high-profile article describing the creation of a new type of carbon after a university investigation found some data were made up.
“The authors of the original paper claimed to have created an entirely new form or carbon, graphyne, which is fundamentally different common diamond or graphite,” said Valentin Rodionov, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, whose team has been investigating the now-retracted work for the past two years.
“If true, this would have been a groundbreaking discovery,” Rodionov told Retraction Watch. His team described its findings in a commentary published on September 2 in the journal.
A new editor’s note in Nature highlights concerns about a paper by Google researchers who claimed computer chips designed in just a few hours using artificial intelligence beat chip plans that human experts took months to develop.
In the note, published September 20, the journal stated:
Readers are alerted that the performance claims in this article have been called into question. The Editors are investigating these concerns, and, if appropriate, editorial action will be taken once this investigation is complete.
The story, titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab,” appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures and refers to Spears “wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.”
Spears, it said, would eventually go on to earn a PhD from Harvard and develop a treatment for diabetes. Before that, however, “Britney will pump out a lot of good data (she is something of a workaholic), but gradually, with her music, her intermittent marriages and pregnancies, not to mention her classes, the amount of time she spends in lab will begin to dwindle.”
In a note appended to the article sometime this week, following thousands of tweets and a Retraction Watch post, the editors write:
Britney Spears has, as Retraction Watch readers no doubt know, been in the news a great deal lately, as the battle over her father’s “broad control over her life and finances” plays out in court. But a science fiction story about Spears that published in Nature in 2008 — the year Spears’ father was appointed her conservator — has prompted apologies from its author and the journal.
The story, which appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures, is titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab.” It begins:
When Britney Spears comes to [Louisiana State University] LSU she’ll be wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.
That and other passages in the piece — in which Spears goes on to earn a PhD from Harvard and discover a treatment for diabetes — caught the attention of more than 1,000 Twitter users since Friday. Many questioned why Nature would publish it. An example:
A Nature journal has announced that it is conducting a “priority” investigation into a new paper claiming that women in science fare better with male rather than female mentors.
A Springer Nature journal waited eight months to retract a paper flagged by the Office of Research Integrity for containing fabricated data — a delay the publisher blames on “staff changes and human error.”
The 2014 article in Neuropsychopharmacology by Alexander Neumeister included “falsified and/or fabricated research methods and results,” according to the findings of the ORI investigation, which were reported in late December of last year. But the retraction notice is dated September 8, 2020.
The notice itself sounds a lot like a child who says “I’m invisible because my eyes are closed.” It reads:
A group of researchers based at Harvard Medical School have retracted their 2019 paper in Nature after a data sleuth detected evidence of suspect images in the article.
The move comes ten months after the journal first heard from the sleuth, Elisabeth Bik.
The paper, “Fatty acids and cancer-amplified ZDHHC19 promote STAT3 activation through S-palmitoylation,” came from the lab of Xu Wu, of the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues. It appeared last August — and immediately caught the attention of Rune Linding, who flagged it for Bik, who in turn noticed several regions of concerning duplications in a few of the Western blots that appeared in the paper.
“People started alerting me,” Vandelanotte, a public health researcher at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, told Retraction Watch. “Hey, have you seen this blog by Nick Brown? And, and then yeah, okay, that was a bad day. Let me put it that way.”
