Category: nature publishing group

Glaxo asks Nature Medicine to retract paper by fired company scientist

natmedcoverIn what could be a significant blow to a major pharmaceutical company, Nature Medicine is reportedly set to retract a 2010 article by a group of researchers affiliated with a Chinese arm of the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline.

We’re not the first to report the news — you can read coverage of it on In the Pipeline and Pharmalot, for starters — which includes the revelation that Glaxo has fired Jingwu Zang, a co-author of the suspect paper and former senior vice president and head of research and development at the Shanghai facility: in other words, a big fish. (Big enough to have a profile in, well, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.)

Pharmalot has quoted a Glaxo spokeswoman: Continue reading Glaxo asks Nature Medicine to retract paper by fired company scientist

Kidney International paper retracted after lab records “were improperly filed”

kidney intA group of University of California, Davis kidney researchers have retracted a paper after being unable to verify key parts of it.

Here’s the detailed retraction notice for “Proteinuria decreases tissue lipoprotein receptor levels resulting in altered lipoprotein structure and increasing lipid levels,” published by Limin Wang, George Kaysen, and colleagues in Kidney International last July: Continue reading Kidney International paper retracted after lab records “were improperly filed”

Nature corrects figures McGill committee found had been “intentionally contrived and falsified”

nature 5 31The second of two corrections by McGill researcher Maya Saleh for what a university committee called “intentionally contrived and falsified” figures has run in Nature.

We reported in January that the McGill committee concluded that

two figures in [a] Nature paper had been “intentionally contrived and falsified.” One of those figures was duplicated in a PNAS paper, which also contained an image that  had incorrectly labeled some proteins.

The committee recommended corrections for both of the papers. The PNAS correction ran in February. Now, the Nature Corrigendum has appeared: Continue reading Nature corrects figures McGill committee found had been “intentionally contrived and falsified”

Updated: Integrity “uncertain,” journal retracts stroke paper

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Experimental & Molecular Medicine has retracted a 2012 paper on stroke by a group of South Korean researchers after learning that one of the figures in the article was unreliable.

The article was titled “Protective effects of transduced Tat-DJ-1 protein against oxidative stress and ischemic brain injury,” and it came from a team at Hallym University in Chunchon.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Updated: Integrity “uncertain,” journal retracts stroke paper

Failure to reproduce experiments, errors lead to retraction of pancreatic cancer paper

lab investThe authors of a paper in Laboratory Investigation have retracted it after they were unable to “reproduce key experiments,” and discovered “several minor errors.”

Here’s the retraction notice for “Slug enhances invasion ability of pancreatic cancer cells through upregulation of matrix metalloproteinase-9 and actin cytoskeleton remodeling,” by Liqun Wu and colleagues of The Affiliated Hospital of Medical College, QingDao University, in China’s Shan Dong Province: Continue reading Failure to reproduce experiments, errors lead to retraction of pancreatic cancer paper

Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper

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courtesy Nature

Nature is retracting a 2010 paper by a team from Princeton and Drexel on the workings of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria in people. How that came about seems to have been a winding road.

The article — a research letter — titled “Branched tricarboxylic acid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum,” came from the Princeton lab of Manuel Llinás. It purported to find that:

Continue reading Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper

Update on “greatly enhanced” photonics paper, with two corrections — one by journal, one by us

nature photonicsLast month we wrote about a paper in Nature Photonics that, because of a measurement error, had to be retracted.

It turns out that wasn’t the only problem with the article — but we’re afraid that the glitch requires us to issue a correction.

The article, “Greatly enhanced continuous-wave terahertz emission by nano-electrodes in a photoconductive photomixer,” has listed Aaron Danner as the last — and, we’d assumed — senior author of the paper. But as Danner pointed out to us, that was a mistake by Nature Photonics.

Continue reading Update on “greatly enhanced” photonics paper, with two corrections — one by journal, one by us

Findings of “greatly enhanced” optics turn out to be, well, greatly enhanced

nature photonicsThe authors of a paper in Nature Photonics have been forced to walk back their article after learning from another group of researchers that their conclusions likely were an, ahem, optical illusion.

The paper, “Greatly enhanced continuous-wave terahertz emission by nano-electrodes in a photoconductive photomixer,” appeared in January 2012 and came from a team led by that included Aaron Danner, an optics expert at the National University of Singapore. As the abstract of the paper explains (to physicists, anyway):

Continue reading Findings of “greatly enhanced” optics turn out to be, well, greatly enhanced

Two retractions for scientist whose work is “not fully supported by the available laboratory records”

SK Manna
SK Manna

The head of immunology at India’s Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Sunil Kumar Manna, has retracted two papers for image problems.

Here’s the notice from Cell Death and Differentiation for “Inhibition of RelA phosphorylation sensitizes apoptosis in constitutive NF-kappaB-expressing and chemoresistant cells:” Continue reading Two retractions for scientist whose work is “not fully supported by the available laboratory records”

Paper linking cell phones during pregnancy to behavior problems in mice corrected

scientificreportsThe authors of a study published last year looking at the effects of cell phone exposure on mice in utero have corrected a figure after it was questioned. New experiments, they write, confirm the original conclusions they drew from the figure.

Here’s the corrected figure from the paper in Scientific Reports, published by Nature Publishing Group: Continue reading Paper linking cell phones during pregnancy to behavior problems in mice corrected