Category: by publisher

Duplicated data, “careless errors” expire lung cancer paper

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A paper about the molecular details of lung cancer is being retracted for repeating datasets and “careless errors” in a pair of figures.

According to the note, the editor of Carcinogenesis wouldn’t have known about the problems if he hadn’t been tipped off that the paper by first author, XiaoJuan Sun — a researcher at Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital in China — shared “significant similarities” with another one of Sun’s papers that was retracted years ago. After the journal investigated the paper, it discovered that the authors had reported the same data as in the retracted paper “without significant additions or amendments,” along with some errors and inconsistencies.

Here’s the detailed note for “The EDA-containing cellular fibronectin induces epithelial mesenchymal transition in lung cancer cells through integrin α9β1-mediated activation of PI3-K /Akt and Erk1/2:”

Continue reading Duplicated data, “careless errors” expire lung cancer paper

Retracted child labor paper “was improperly attributed,” copied text verbatim

C1 PAGE.inddThe American Journal of Public Health has retracted a paper after it was published online, when editors discovered that the author had plagiarized text verbatim and attributed the material to completely different sources.

“Child Farm Laborers” discusses child labor through the lens of the American photographers that documented the lives of young farm workers at the beginning of the century, such as Lewis Hine. It was authored Aung Zaw Win, whose affiliation on the paper is listed as Notre Dame de Namur University, in California.

The article was slated to be published in the journal’s August issue but editors printed the retraction shortly after it posted online. Here’s the notice:

Continue reading Retracted child labor paper “was improperly attributed,” copied text verbatim

Journal retracts — and republishes — small study on gamma rays for OCD

Screen Shot 2015-10-28 at 8.40.00 PMJAMA Psychiatry has retracted and republished a paper on a cutting-edge procedure for patients with obsessive compulsive disorder.

In the original paper, the authors claimed that three out of eight patients who underwent a procedure that used gamma rays to kill brain cells showed improvements 12 months later (versus zero in the group who underwent a “sham” procedure). But after a reader noticed an “inadvertent” error in the calculation of how many patients had improved, the authors realized that only two of the patients had responded meaningfully to the procedure.

The new results “did not reach statistical significance,” the authors write in a “Notice of Retraction and Replacement.”  JAMA Psychiatry published it yesterday, along with a new version of the article, a letter from psychiatrist Christopher Baethge pointing out the error, and an editorial. The original article is available in the supplemental material of the new version, with the errors highlighted.

Here’s the note in full for “Gamma ventral capsulotomy for obsessive-compulsive disorder: a randomized clinical trial,” which explains the error:

Continue reading Journal retracts — and republishes — small study on gamma rays for OCD

Biology journal bans plagiarizers, reviewers with non-institutional email addresses

87959_relDNA and Cell Biology has declared it will ban any authors who submit plagiarized manuscripts for three years, and will no longer accept suggestions of reviewers with non-institutional email addresses.

The move comes after a wave of hundreds of retractions stemming from fake peer reviews, often occurring when authors supply fake emails for suggested reviewers.

In an editorial published online October 23, editor Carol Shoshkes Reiss notes that the decision to ban authors who plagiarize material stems from a rash of recent submissions containing overlapping text: Continue reading Biology journal bans plagiarizers, reviewers with non-institutional email addresses

Taste researcher falsified data in two papers: ORI

ori-logoA federal report has found that a former University of Maryland postdoc “falsified and/or fabricated” data in two papers about taste receptors.

The Office of Research Integrity report found that Maria C.P. Geraedts manipulated bar graphs in the papers to “produce the desired result.” Both have been retracted. Geraedts left academia in 2014, and is now a science writer.

We reported on one retraction in July, “Gustatory stimuli representing different perceptual qualities elicit distinct patterns of neuropeptide secretion from taste buds,” published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The other, “Transformation of postingestive glucose responses after deletion of sweet taste receptor subunits or gastric bypass surgery,” published in 2012 in the American Journal of Physiology Endocrinology and Metabolism, was retracted in September. Here’s the note, which cites the university’s investigation: Continue reading Taste researcher falsified data in two papers: ORI

Bone researcher manipulated data in JAMA study, says investigation

Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 10.53.53 AMA bone researcher manipulated data in a 2011 JAMA study about an inexpensive treatment for osteoporosis. That’s the conclusion of an investigation at the researcher’s former workplace, the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, the Toronto Star reports.

The study — led and manipulated by Sophie Jamal — followed 243 women over two years, as they applied nitroglycerin ointment once a day. The ointment is currently used to prevent chest pain and treat anal fissure pain by relaxing blood vessels; Jamal’s study concluded it could help patients with osteoporosis, too:

Among postmenopausal women, nitroglycerin ointment modestly increased [bone mineral density] and decreased bone resorption.

But even the modest effect was too good to be true. Continue reading Bone researcher manipulated data in JAMA study, says investigation

Author with three retractions objects to mega-correction following investigation

DevelopmentWe’ve uncovered a “mega-correction“ for a 2010 paper in Development, posted as the result of an investigation into the first author which has already led to three retractions.

Last year, the Utrecht University investigation into Pankaj Dhonukshe found “manipulation in some form” in four papers, and concluded that he committed a “violation of academic integrity.” The investigation also led to the retraction of a 2012 Cell paper and two papers in Nature that were co-authored by Dhonukshe. 

Development began investigating the corrected paper after being contacted by one of the authors and alerted to the results of the university’s investigation. The notice includes a statement from Dhonukshe objecting to the correction. Continue reading Author with three retractions objects to mega-correction following investigation

P53 researcher submitted paper “without permission from his co-authors”

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One issue that we see pretty regularly is a paper submitted by one author without the permission of the others.

That’s what’s happened with “p53-induced Rap2B positively regulates migration in cells exposed to glucose deprivation,” published in July by Molecular Carcinogenesis. The paper looks at a protein called p53, well-known to regulate cell growth and, when mutated, cause cancer.

Here’s the pretty straightforward retraction note:

Continue reading P53 researcher submitted paper “without permission from his co-authors”

Symposium intro pulled after author refuses to revise following changes to lineup

Integrative and Comparative Biology

A biology journal has pulled the introduction to a symposium that was published online before the symposium papers had been finalized. After reviewers rejected multiple papers, the author of the introduction — and organizer of the symposium — refused to revise his portion accordingly, so the journal retracted it.

Suzanne Miller, an assistant editor at Integrative and Comparative Biology, told us that the journal ended up rejecting two out of the seven papers in the symposium. When editors asked the symposium organizer, Valentine Lance, to rewrite the introduction — which contained a brief background on each speaker — he told us that he refused to do the rewrite, and said that he “simply quit.”

Miller told us the journal is now changing its practice as a result of this incident: Continue reading Symposium intro pulled after author refuses to revise following changes to lineup

Correction restores confidence in results of confidence study

Strategic Management JournalA study that looked at how entrepreneurs’ confidence levels change depending on market conditions has been corrected to fix an error that flipped the results of one of the experiments.

The paper was published in 2013 by the Strategic Management Journal, and explored how entrepreneurs stay confident in difficult marketplaces by studying how people reacted to tasks of varying difficulty. In one experiment, participants were asked how well they thought they did on an easy quiz and how well they did on a hard quiz. Results showed that “participants underestimated their scores on the easy quiz” and “overestimated their performance on the difficult quiz.” However, authors wrote the opposite in the final paper.

Here’s the correction notice for “Making Sense of Overconfidence in Market Entry”:

Continue reading Correction restores confidence in results of confidence study