Category: by publisher

Paper on plant immunity can’t fight off manipulation

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A paper on how plants respond to bacteria has an invader of its own — data manipulation.

The “irregularities and inappropriate data manipulation” were found in a figure produced by the first author, Ching-Wei Chen, whose LinkedIn page lists him as a student at the National Taiwan University. The authors were unable to replicate the results in the figure, according to the note.

The authors are doing more experiments to verify the main conclusion of the 2014 paper, “The Arabidopsis Malectin-Like Leucine-Rich Repeat Receptor-Like Kinase IOS1 Associates with the Pattern Recognition Receptors FLS2 and EFR and Is Critical for Priming of Pattern-Triggered Immunity,” published in The Plant Cell.

The retraction note explains the what happened in more detail:

Continue reading Paper on plant immunity can’t fight off manipulation

“Totally crappy:” Library magazine adds quotes from vendor without authors’ consent

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 12.43.15 PMTwo librarians who wrote a feature story for the magazine American Libraries say that editors added quotes from an educational company without their consent.

The feature, “Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries,” was included in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of the magazine, published by the American Libraries Association. It includes some data from a survey conducted by the ALA and Gale — a company that sells digital resources, such as a collection of British newspapers beginning in the 1600s. According to the survey, an “overwhelming 97% of libraries agree” that digital resources like those archives should be available in library collections.

The authors aren’t objecting to that statistic. What they are objecting to, they say, is the journal’s decision to include some general quotes from a Gale representative, without checking with them first. The authors — Stewart Varner, a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of North Carolina, and Patricia Hswe, who co-heads the department of Publishing and Curation Services at Penn State  —  say they first learned of the quotes when they got the magazine in the mail.

On his blog, Varner calls it a “totally crappy” situation, and explains “the article was edited after we thought we had turned in the final version:” Continue reading “Totally crappy:” Library magazine adds quotes from vendor without authors’ consent

Data dispute forces journal to pull paper about rare bird on valuable land

coverThe authors of a paper about the density of an endangered bird on valuable Texas lands are disputing the journal’s decision to pull the paper after other scientists objected to some of its contents.

The paper, published online in August by the Journal of Field Ornithology, compared different models for estimating the number of golden-cheeked warblers that nest in Texas. According to the Austin American-Statesman, some of that land includes highly sought-after woodlands. Developers had used estimates from recent years, which suggested that the bird population was in relatively good health, to petition to open that land for real estate development. But the new paper concluded that those estimates were too high.

After some scientists who produced the more rosy estimates claimed that the some of their data had been included in the newest paper without permission, the editor in chief decided to retract it.

That was in November. There’s no retraction note for “Density influences accuracy of model-based estimates for a forest songbird.” We contacted the editor in chief, Gary Ritchison, to ask why. He told us,

Continue reading Data dispute forces journal to pull paper about rare bird on valuable land

Math journal retracts entire issue following peer-review problems

home_coverThe editor of a special issue of a math journal — and author of many of the papers in it — has officially retracted the entire thing, after promising to withdraw it last year following issues with the review process.

According to the note in Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids, the peer-review process was “less rigorous than the journal requires.” Indeed, that process was coordinated by guest editor David Y. Gao, a mathematician at the Federation University Australia, who was also author on 11 of the 13 papers present in the issue.

Gao told us in November that he was withdrawing the issue because he thought it would be better suited as a book.

Here is the official retraction note, which focuses on the conflict of interest:

Continue reading Math journal retracts entire issue following peer-review problems

Renewable energy researcher recycled material, agrees to withdraw 10 papers

S13640321Investigations at two institutions at Taiwan determined in 2013 that a renewable energy researcher duplicated his own work; the researcher agreed to pull 10 papers. A total of six have been withdrawn or retracted, two in November, 2015.

Shyi-Min Lu is the corresponding author on the two newly retracted papers, from Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. The retractions follow investigations at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, where Lu used to work, and National Taiwan University, his former employer. Lu admitted to committing offenses in 10 papers. He was fired from NTU, where he was a research assistant at the university’s Energy Research Center.

First author Falin Chen — also a co-author on the paper duplicated by the retractions — was not aware that the papers bearing his name had been submitted. He told us how he found out:  Continue reading Renewable energy researcher recycled material, agrees to withdraw 10 papers

IVF embryo paper pulled for plagiarism, errors, lack of permissions

6A journal is pulling an article (with approval of “most” of the authors) because a similar paper had already been published in Chinese.

That wasn’t the only problem with “Aneuploidy analysis of non-pronuclear embryos from IVF with use of array CGH: a case report,” published in the Journal of Molecular Histology. 

The retraction note lists the three things that led to the paper’s retraction:

Continue reading IVF embryo paper pulled for plagiarism, errors, lack of permissions

Cancer Cell paper under investigation following anonymous queries on PubPeer

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A Cancer Cell paper that caused a flurry of activity on the website PubPeer is under investigation, after the last author announced on the site that he’d requested a correction from the journal.

The 2012 paper sparked a lively dialogue last month on the post-publication discussion site, as commenters questioned Western blot images in which some bands appeared to be duplicates. The last author responded, noting he had alerted the journal to a “mishap,” and a correction would be forthcoming. However, some commenters remained unsatisfied, and questioned why the correction was taking so long to appear, as well as the explanation for what went wrong.

A spokesman from Cancer Cell confirmed to us the paper is under investigation:

Continue reading Cancer Cell paper under investigation following anonymous queries on PubPeer

Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding

Bruce Eaton
Bruce Eaton

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Daniel Feldheim

The National Science Foundation will no longer fund a pair of chemists who “recklessly falsified data,” according to a report from the NSF’s Office of Inspector General, unless they “take specific actions to address issues” in a 2004 Science paper.

That paper is going to be retracted as soon as possible, Science told us. The co-authors that the NSF reprimanded are Bruce Eaton and Dan Feldheim, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder; they have been under scrutiny since 2008, when an investigation at North Carolina State University, their former employer, found that the Science paper contained falsified data.

The paper, “RNA-Mediated Metal-Metal Bond Formation in the Synthesis of Hexagonal Palladium Nanoparticles,” has been cited 138 times.

Science Editor in Chief  Marcia McNutt told us today that a retraction is in the works:

Continue reading Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding

Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper

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Authors are retracting a 2012 paper on cholesterol metabolism in zebrafish after realizing it included a case of mistaken identity in a DNA sequence crucial to some aspects of the experiment.  

A postdoc misidentified the plasmid in question after failing to fully sequence it before including it in the experiment. A technician in the lab found the mistake, last author Steven Farber, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Maryland, explained:

When the omitted region was correctly sequenced we discovered it had an error.

He told us in a phone interview what that felt like:

We were like, holy crap.

Next came months of back and forth with the journal, discussing whether to correct or retract the paper. Farber tells us the mistake, which affects two figures,

was unfortunate. Most of the paper is in fact correct.

The paper, “Visualization of Lipid Metabolism in the Zebrafish Intestine Reveals a Relationship between NPC1L1-Mediated Cholesterol Uptake and Dietary Fatty Acid,” published in Chemistry & Biology, has been cited 21 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s the detailed retraction note:  Continue reading Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper

Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper

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The corresponding author of a paper on testicular cancer is telling readers to discount a figure after she learned it may have been manipulated.

Although that one figure in the 2005 paper in the British Journal of Cancer may be problematic, the authors found data to support the other figures, and its conclusions.

This isn’t the first time first author Kerry Manton has faced questions over her data — in 2012, one of her papers was retracted following an investigation by her institution, the Queensland University of Technology. And in 2014, QUT repaid a $275,000 grant after finding Manton

failed to fulfill (her) responsibilities in relation to the responsible dissemination of research findings and that this, coupled with a failure to correct the errors, constituted research misconduct.

Here’s the corrigendum for “Hypermethylation of the 5′ CpG island of the gene encoding the serine protease Testisin promotes its loss in testicular tumorigenesis:”

Continue reading Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper