We have an update on two papers about lung cancer screening by Claudia Henschke and colleagues that were subject to an Expression of Concern early last year.
The original Expression of Concern in Cancer read, in part: Continue reading ORI, OHRP find “some human subject issues” in Henschke lung cancer studies, but no evidence of misconduct
Plant Physiology, the official journal of the American Society of Plant Biologists, has retracted a 2004 article by a team of ag industry researchers, including a former husband-wife duo, for what could be misconduct by the husband.
The retraction notice is vague enough, however, that we’re not entirely sure what went wrong, and no one wants to help us confirm — or even attempt to disprove — our inferences. Continue reading Spud dud, as agricultural industry potato paper gets pulled a decade after publication
Markets undergo flash crashes — when stocks or bonds rapidly nosedive in value and then just as rapidly recover — every day. On May 6, 2010, for example, the entire equity market flamed out and then nearly recovered its value all in the matter of hours.
Economic papers can do the same, apparently. Take the recent withdrawal of an paper from the Journal of Financial Markets: Continue reading Markets crash, and so does a paper explaining why
A group of veterinary researchers from Taiwan has lost their 2012 paper in the Journal of Chromatography B for misuse of propriety material.
What that means we’re not quite sure, but we have a guess.
The article, “Pilot production of recombinant human clotting factor IX from transgenic sow milk,” was published last July by four scientists at the Animal Technology Institute of Taiwan.
But, as the retraction notice explains, the paper didn’t stick:
Continue reading Misuse of data forces retraction of paper on sow’s milk
SpringerPlus has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Saudi mathematicians who lifted text and figures from previously published articles.
The paper, “On soft expert topological spaces,” appeared in October 2012. According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Plagiarism leads to retraction of math paper
A potential weight loss drug has been dealt what could be a serious setback after regulators found problems at two trial sites.
While awaiting a final report, The Lancet, which published a study of the drug, tesofensine, has issued an Expression of Concern: Continue reading Trial irregularities earn Lancet study of potential weight loss drug tesofensine Expression of Concern
Last 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.
A pair of Iranian physicists is facing the retraction of one of their papers after editors found out some of the work was plagiarized from two textbooks and an encyclopedia.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Plagiarism of textbooks, encyclopedia leads to physics retraction
Whose business are the reasons behind a retraction?
Our readers will no doubt know by now that we think they’re basically everyone’s — at least if journals want us to believe that they’re interested in maintaining the integrity of the scientific record. But not all editors seem to agree. Hank Edmunds, for example, didn’t in early 2011, telling us, “It’s none of your damn business.” A chemistry journal editor said, in a similar vein, “the purpose of keeping these retraction notices slim is not to produce too much detail.”
Now, a psychology journal editor joins those ranks. Here’s the notice in question: Continue reading Editor on retraction details: “I do not think this is the business of anyone but our journal, please”
A paper suggesting that scientists may want to rethink what levels of benzene are carcinogenic has led to a sharp exchange in the journal that originally published it.
In 2006, Stephen Rappaport, of UNC-Chapel Hill, and colleagues, published a paper that began by saying that benzene
is an important industrial chemical that is also emitted into the air from gasoline, engine exhausts and combustion of organic materials (including cigarette smoke) (1,2). Occupational exposures to benzene at air levels greater than ∼10 p.p.m., have long been linked to hematotoxicity and to acute myelogenous leukemia (3–5). A recent report of hematotoxic effects in workers exposed to benzene <1 p.p.m. (6) has raised additional concerns regarding the health consequences of low exposures to this contaminant.
The authors conclude: Continue reading Environmental scientists call for retraction of oil industry-funded paper on benzene exposure