Category: by publisher

The “worst moment of my scientific career:” Two bird migration articles brought down by analytical error

JAvianBio_ak19Evolutionary and conservation biologists in Spain are retracting two articles – one from the Journal of Avian Biology and the other from Ardeola – because they discovered a fatal flaw in their analysis.

The Journal of Avian Biology article, “Are European birds leaving traditional wintering grounds in the Mediterranean?” aimed to determine whether the abundance of passerines had decreased in recent decades, but failed to control for birds that may have gotten killed by hunters. Although it was published in January, we can only find an abstract from its acceptance by the journal in November 2014.

The authors detail the saga of their error in the retraction notice: Continue reading The “worst moment of my scientific career:” Two bird migration articles brought down by analytical error

Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked

science coverIn what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.

[3:45 p.m. Eastern, 5/28/15: Please see an update on this story; the study has been retracted.]

Donald Green, of Columbia, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, published the paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” in December 2014. The study received widespread media attention, including from This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,  The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost, as LaCour’s site notes.

David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, were two of the people impressed with the work, so they planned an extension of it, as they explain in a timeline posted online yesterday: Continue reading Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked

ORI-sanctioned former UT-Southwestern cancer researchers up to 10 retractions

CLThere’s been a 10th retraction from two former postdocs at a UT-Southwestern cancer research center who were sanctioned by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) last September, in part due to observations and comments from Retraction Watch readers.

It’s a 2008 Cancer Letters paper, “Methylation of apoptosis related genes in the pathogenesis and prognosis of prostate cancer,” retracted at the request of Makoto Suzuki, the first author who has claimed responsibility for falsifying data in this and five other papers. Continue reading ORI-sanctioned former UT-Southwestern cancer researchers up to 10 retractions

Improper citation, PubPeer comment snowballs into double retraction in phys chem journal

chemphyschemChemPhysChem is retracting a pair of articles by a group of researchers in China and their colleagues who pieced together the work from two previously published articles.

The papers appeared in 2012 and 2015, and were flagged by a reader whose own work had been improperly cited, according to the editor of the journal.

The 2012 article was titled “Adsorption Features of Flavonoids on Macroporous Adsorption Resins Functionalized with Ionic Liquids,” and has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The senior author was Duolong Di, of the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics in Qingdao. According to the retraction notice:
 Continue reading Improper citation, PubPeer comment snowballs into double retraction in phys chem journal

Duplication snuffs out pollen abstract

AACIA Canadian research team has retracted a meeting abstract “published in error” from a supplement by Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology, as it had previously been published in another journal.

The December 2014 abstract, “A post-hoc qualitative analysis of real time heads-up pollen counting versus traditional microscopy counting in the environmental exposure unit (EEU),” describes a custom digital imaging method for counting pollen in real-time. The abstract was published ten months earlier, in February 2014, under the same title in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Here is the full retraction note:

Continue reading Duplication snuffs out pollen abstract

Retraction-plagued management researcher hit with expression of concern

OrgBehav_ak13The editor-in-chief of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has issued an Expression of Concern about a 2011 paper that explores the link between ethical leadership and employee performance.

The paper, “Linking ethical leadership to employee performance: The roles of leader–member exchange, self-efficacy, and organizational identification,” is one of seven that were flagged in a report by Arizona State University (ASU) that investigated the corresponding author, Frederick Walumbwa, for possible research misconduct, as we noted in November.

“The fit statistics reported in the article contain many errors,” the notice says. It goes on to say that “it is difficult to understand the implications of these errors unless the raw data is made available” — but that the authors were not able to provide it. Here’s the full text of the expression of concern: Continue reading Retraction-plagued management researcher hit with expression of concern

Harvard biofilm paper in Cell breaks down after challenged findings can’t be repeated

CELL_161_4.inddResearchers at Harvard have retracted a Cell paper on biofilm disassembly after they repeated the experiment—following contradictory results from another team—and the new results “can no longer support” the original conclusions.

The 2012 paper, “A Self-Produced Trigger for Biofilm Disassembly that Targets Exopolysaccharide,” describes a factor called norspermidine, produced by the bacteria Bacillus subtilis, that appeared to break down biofilms. The researchers used it to prevent biofilm formation of B. subtilis, Escherichia coli, and Staphylococcus aureus. The paper was cited 72 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Two years after it was published, a team from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the University of Dundee in the UK contradicted the findings in another Cell publication, “Norspermidine Is Not a Self-Produced Trigger for Biofilm Disassembly.” This time, the authors concluded that norspermidine is not present in B. subtilis biofilms, and actually promotes, rather than breaks down, biofilms. They wrote: Continue reading Harvard biofilm paper in Cell breaks down after challenged findings can’t be repeated

Déjà vu: JBC epigenetics paper is retracted, then largely re-published with fewer authors

JBCA group of authors have withdrawn a 2011 Journal of Biological Chemistry paper, but then appear to have re-published almost the same paper a month later, only this time with just five of the original nine authors.

The paper, “HDAC3-dependent reversible lysine acetylation of cardiac myosin heavy chain isoforms modulates their enzymatic and motor activity,” concerns a type of protein regulation important to cardiac stress. Written by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh, it has been cited 16 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. It was rated “Exceptional” by a reviewer on the Faculty of 1000 website.

As we’ve come to expect from the JBC, here’s the full retraction notice, in all its inexplicit glory: Continue reading Déjà vu: JBC epigenetics paper is retracted, then largely re-published with fewer authors

Third retraction for GWU biologist as university seeks to dismiss his $8 million lawsuit

Rakesh Kumar, via George Washington University
Rakesh Kumar, via George Washington University

Cancer biologist Rakesh Kumar has chalked up another retraction, this time for “identical,” “duplicated,” and “replicated” figures and images.

It comes on the heels of a flurry of motions in Kumar’s $8 million lawsuit against his employer, George Washington University, for breach of contract and emotional distress because it removed him as department chair last year and placed his research on hold. Kumar remains employed by the university.

The retracted paper, published in Development in 2004, “Metastasis-associated protein 1 deregulation causes inappropriate mammary gland development and tumorigenesis,” analyzed the role of a protein, MTA1, in mammary gland development and cancer. It was published while Kumar was at M.D. Anderson in Houston, and has been cited 81 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

By our count, Kumar now has three retractions and five corrections. Numerous anonymous comments on Kumar’s papers have been posted on PubPeer, many of them critiquing images. Here’s the complete notice from Development: Continue reading Third retraction for GWU biologist as university seeks to dismiss his $8 million lawsuit

Dude, whose gene is that? Genetics paper retracted for lack of permission

pbrPlant Biotechnology Reports is retracting a 2009 paper by a group of researchers in South Korea because the authors submitted the article “without the permission” of the owner of a gene used in the study.

The paper abstract is no longer online, though the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) recommends that retraction notices be linked to the retracted article wherever possible. So we can’t even tell you what the paper is about, outside of its title: “T1 transgenic tobacco plants carrying multicopy T-DNAs at the same locus exhibit various expression levels of transgenes.”

Here’s all we’ve got—the retraction notice itself: Continue reading Dude, whose gene is that? Genetics paper retracted for lack of permission