In yesterday’s Weekend Reads, we highlighted a piece by Hope Jahren explaining why she wouldn’t agree to a Q&A with Nature. We found out after Weekend Reads had posted that the story had moved on, so here’s an update.
Jahren was objecting — as did a number of people — to a letter published in Nature earlier in the week by Lukas Koube of Sherman, Texas, which began: Continue reading Nature apologizes for publishing letter dismissing need for gender balance
Scientists: Have you ever found it difficult to keep track of all those papers you publish? Who can blame you? So many journals, so much pressure to publish or perish.
That must have been what happened to a quintet of authors from Shanghai who’ve just had to retract an article from the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. Here’s the notice (sadly, behind a paywall) [see note at end of post] for “Role of clofazimine in the treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: a retrospective observational cohort assessment:” Continue reading We did what? Authors retract paper after forgetting they’d published the same study elsewhere
With all the fuss about Yoshitaka Fujii, the current record holder for most retractions, you can be forgiven for forgetting that Joachim Boldt once owned that title, at least for about a year.
Well, Boldt has another retraction, although he’d need to double his tally (which is in the range of 90) to match Fujii’s “impressive” haul.
The new paper is, well, old, having been published in 1996, some 14 years before Boldt’s tribulations began. The article was titled “Influence of different volume therapy regimens on regulators of the circulation in the critically ill.” It appeared in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, and has been cited 45 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
According to the notice: Continue reading Another retraction for former record holder Joachim Boldt
The debate over the retraction of a highly controversial paper on the effects of GMOs on rats continues unabated. This week, Adriane Fugh-Berman and Thomas Sherman wrote on the Hastings Center website that Continue reading Journal editor defends retraction of GMO-rats study while authors reveal some of paper’s history
Last month, we wrote about the retraction of a study in the Journal of Surgical Oncology (JSO) for duplication. But we were a bit frustrated by the lack of information in the notice. As we wrote at the time:
It would be nice to know a couple of things here. For example, when and where was the duplicated paper published? And who were the authors?
Well, we’ve heard from the journal, and have some updates. Brittany White, managing editor of the JSO, tells us, on behalf of editor-in-chief Stephen F. Sener, that: Continue reading Surgery journal adds detail to retraction notice following Retraction Watch coverage
Last month, we brought you the story of two retractions by Yale’s Laurie Santos because the team discovered errors in the way the first author had coded the data. That first author, Neha Mahajan, took full responsibility for the coding problems, according to the retraction notices, and a university investigation cleared her of any “intentional, knowing, reckless, or grossly negligent action.”
But a few of our readers noted that the papers refer to a second coder on some of the experiments, and have questioned whether that’s compatible with Mahajan being solely responsible for the errors.
We asked Santos earlier this week to explain the apparent discrepancy, which she did along with a description of how her lab has made changes to prevent such errors in the future: Continue reading Psychology researcher explains how retraction-causing errors led to change in her lab
A group of exercise researchers at the University of Rome Tor Vergata has lost their May 2010 paper in BMC Physiology on the effects of marathon running on blood cells, because of figure irregularities.
The article, “The effect of marathon on mRNA expression of anti-apoptotic and pro-apoptotic proteins and sirtuins family in male recreational long-distance runners,” purported to find that marathoning arrested apoptosis, or programmed cell death. It has been cited 13 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
According to this press release: Continue reading Out of the running: Dodgy blots prompt retraction of paper on marathoning and cell death
More than two years ago, we wrote about a retraction for duplication in Biophysical Journal prompted by an email from pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis. That post generated a robust discussion, including one comment from someone calling himself or herself “Double Dutch.”
This past weekend, the last author of that paper, Rienk van Grondelle, left a lengthy response to that comment in which he explained how the duplication happened. We’ve confirmed that it was van Grondelle who left the comment, which we reproduce here in full (we’ve added paragraph breaks for readability): Continue reading “Stupid, it should not be done that way”: Researcher explains how duplications led to a retraction
The other day, we wrote about a puzzling situation that appeared to involve the ninth retraction for an anti-terrorism researcher. A book chapter by Nasrullah Memon, of the University of Southern Denmark, was marked “Retracted,” both in the abstract’s title and on the PDF. But Memon forwarded us an email from Springer, the book’s publisher, saying that they had decided to publish an erratum rather than retract.
And indeed, sometime after we published our post, the retraction was changed to an erratum, with the following notice: Continue reading A retracted retraction: Backsies for an anti-terrorism paper
Karel Bezouška, who, as we noted last year “broke into a lab refrigerator so he could tamper with samples being used to try to replicate the experiments during the investigation,” has had his fourth paper retracted.
Here’s the notice, for “Synthesis of Multivalent Glycoconjugates Containing the Immunoactive LELTE Peptide: Effect of Glycosylation on Cellular Activation and Natural Killing by Human Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells,” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS): Continue reading Karel Bezouška, who broke into lab to tamper with investigation, has JACS paper retracted