Category: society journal retractions

You’ve been dupe’d: Data so nice, you see them twice

j repro infertLast Friday we resurrected a previous feature of Retraction Watch, compiling five retractions that appeared to be simple acts of duplication.

This week, we spotlight another five unrelated retractions which, as we said last week, cover duplications in which the same – or some of the same – authors published the same – or some of the same – information in two different papers.

Most duplications are straightforward — all authors simply send the same or similar study to two or more journals, a violation of most journals’ terms of use.  For instance: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d: Data so nice, you see them twice

What to do when you make a mistake? Advice from authors who’ve been there

cpp-150After a group of researchers noticed an error that affected the analysis of a survey of psychologists working with medical teams to help pediatric patients, they didn’t just issue a retraction — they published a commentary explaining what exactly went wrong.

The error was discovered by a research assistant who was assembling a scientific poster, and noticed the data didn’t align with what was reported in the journal. The error, the authors note, was:

an honest one, a mistake of not reverse coding a portion of the data that none of the authors caught over several months of editing and conference calls. Unfortunately, this error led to misrepresentation and misinterpretation of a subset of the data, impacting the results and discussion.

Needless to say, these authors — who use their “lessons learned” to help other researchers avoid similar missteps — earn a spot in our “doing the right thing” category. The retraction and commentary both appear in Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology.

Their first piece of advice in “Retraction experience, lessons learned, and recommendations for clinician researchers” — assume errors will happen, and not vice versa: Continue reading What to do when you make a mistake? Advice from authors who’ve been there

Following an earlier investigation, GW biologist earns two expressions of concern

3.cover (1)The Journal of Biological Chemistry has flagged two papers by a George Washington University cancer biologist with expressions of concern, following an investigation completed by the university in 2014.

The notes contain little specific information; all we know is that there are questions about the data and conclusions in the papers.

The last author on both papers is Rakesh Kumar, who adds these EoCs to a count that includes, according to our records, three retractions and five corrections. Plus an $8 million lawsuit against his employer for emotional distress when they put him on leave from his position as department chair.

The studies — “Stimulation of inducible nitric oxide by hepatitis B virus transactivator protein HBx requires MTA1 coregulator” and “Regulation of NF-B circuitry by a component of the nucleosome remodeling and deacetylase complex controls inflammatory response homeostasis” — have been cited 22 times and 33 times respectively, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

The expression of concern is the same for both papers — and matches others that we’ve seen from JBC:

Continue reading Following an earlier investigation, GW biologist earns two expressions of concern

So, pot may not be as harmless as a recent study suggested

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Researchers are correcting a widely covered study that suggested chronic use of pot might not put users at risk of problems later in life.

It turns out that initial, unexpected finding — covered by Newsweek, The Washington Post, Quartz, and (of course) The Stoner’s Cookbook (now known as HERB) — wasn’t quite right, and a reanalysis found users had a small uptick in risk for psychosis. The authors have issued a lengthy correction in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors that includes some supplemental analysis, too.

Not surprisingly, the study’s findings engendered some controversy, which prompted the authors to reanalyze their data, collected from 408 males with varying levels of marijuana use, who were followed from their teens into their 30s.

Now, an American Psychological Association press release that accompanied the initial findings in August contains an editors note explaining why those aren’t quite correct:

Continue reading So, pot may not be as harmless as a recent study suggested

Paper on pine tree genetics chopped for duplication

naslovna_vol6_no2A paper on genetic variability in Austrian pine trees apparently didn’t vary enough from other work.

The journal is now retracting the 2012 paper for having significant overlap with another paper published in 2008. Another researcher pointed out the duplication — which was unintentional, according to the note, the result of

an apparent failure in communication between the co-authors on both papers which caused the papers to be overlapped.

The overlapping papers share a first author, Aleksandar Lucic, who works at the Institute of Forestry in Serbia. The other author on both papers is Vasilije Isajev, at the Faculty of Forestry in Belgrade.

“Analysis of Genetic Variability of Austrian Pine (Pinus nigra Arnold) in Serbia Using Protein Markers” was published in South-East European Forestry. The journal is not indexed on Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s the retraction note:

Continue reading Paper on pine tree genetics chopped for duplication

Three expressions of concern added to cancer researcher’s notice list

3.coverQuestions about data and conclusions in papers by a cancer researcher at the University of Maryland have led to three expressions of concern in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The notices follow four retractions — two for image duplications and two for unknown reasons — for Anil K. Jaiswal. The three papers under notice are all on mechanisms that regulate gene expression; PubPeer commenters have raised questions about some of the figures in the papers.

The expression of concern on all three papers reads, in full:

Continue reading Three expressions of concern added to cancer researcher’s notice list

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

Retractions follow misconduct by biologist, one more on the way

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Two journals have retracted papers by a biologist at the University of Tokyo who admitted to scientific misconduct, including data duplication and misrepresentation. Another journal is planning to retract one of the researcher’s papers later this month.

Hyun Kim studies a protein known as the “ski protein.” However, one analysis of the role of ski protein in development was retracted late last month by the Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences. The journal decided to investigate after Kim admitted to misconduct in two other papers published in a different journal.

Here’s the note for the paper:

Continue reading Retractions follow misconduct by biologist, one more on the way

Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device

graphic_amt_cover_homepageTo climate scientist Pieter Tans, a “novel” air sampling device in a recent paper looked a little too familiar. Specifically, like a device that he had invented — the AirCore, which he calls a “tape recorder” for air.

The journal editors came up with a unique solution to the disagreement that followed, which the editor in chief called “rather unclear:” The journal ran an editorial in which both Tans and the authors of the paper contend that their device is unique.

The paper in question, “A novel Whole Air Sample Profiler (WASP) for the quantification of volatile organic compounds in the boundary layer,” was published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. It has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

It now bears a note, in bold and red: “Please read the Editorial Note before accessing the paper.” 

Here’s how the editorial laid out the case:

Continue reading Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device