Category: springer retractions

Diabetes researchers retract, correct and republish study on mortality rates

diabetologiaA diabetes paper that received quite a bit of media attention when it was published in June 2013 was retracted and reissued to fix data errors shortly after publication.

The paper, which showed a steep decline in mortality rates for diabetics in Ontario, Canada, and the UK between 1996 and 2009, was republished in December 2013, with the same conclusion and the errors corrected.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Mortality trends in patients with and without diabetes in Ontario, Canada and the UK from 1996 to 2009: a population-based study”: Continue reading Diabetes researchers retract, correct and republish study on mortality rates

Bearly believable: Water bear paper retracted for missing lab notebooks

Water bear, via Wikimedia Commons
Image via Wikimedia Commons

Tardigrades, the most hardy animals on or off planet Earth, can survive boiling, freezing, and even the ravages of outer space.

Unfortunately, some data on water bears’ memories proved to be less long-lasting, earning a retraction for a George Mason University researcher who also published the paper without alerting her co-workers ahead of time.

Here’s the notice for “Suspended animation: effects on short-term and long-term positive associative memory in Hypsibius dujardini,” which first appeared in Invertebrate Neuroscience: Continue reading Bearly believable: Water bear paper retracted for missing lab notebooks

Mistaken punctuation, misreferencing, and other euphemisms for plagiarism

soas_logo_3It’s always amusing to see how far a journal will bend over backward to avoid coming out and calling something “plagiarism.”

We’ve got two notices for you that exemplify the phenomenon, which we discussed in our Lab Times column last year.

The first, an article about apartheid, was presented at a student conference and published in the Polyvocia: The SOAS Journal of Graduate Research. It was later retracted because the author “should have used quotation marks around material written verbatim from that source.”

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Mistaken punctuation, misreferencing, and other euphemisms for plagiarism

Yogurt to be kidding me: Five articles plagiarized in one retracted paper

After typing up 96 citations, researchers from the National Institute for Digestive Diseases, I.R.C.C.S. “S. de Bellis,” in Bari, Italy, apparently ran out of steam for the last five, earning themselves a retraction for plagiarism in a literature review of the effects of probiotics on intestinal cancer.

Here’s the notice for “Intestinal Microbiota, Probiotics and Human Gastrointestinal Cancers,” from the Journal of Gastrointestinal Cancer: Continue reading Yogurt to be kidding me: Five articles plagiarized in one retracted paper

Publishing gadfly demands journal editor’s resignation, then has “fairly incomprehensible” paper rejected

sci eng ethicsA scientific publishing gadfly who was banned earlier this year from an Elsevier journal for “personal attacks and threats” has had a paper rejected by a Springer journal after he called for the editor’s resignation because of alleged incompetence.

As detailed in a comment left at Retraction Watch, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva submitted a manuscript titled “One Conjunction, a World of Ethical Difference: How Elsevier, the ICMJE and Neurology Define Authorship” to Science and Engineering Ethics on November 11, 2012. As of last week, despite a number of messages sent to editors of the journal, he had not had a decision on the manuscript.

As a result, on July 14 of this year, Teixeira da Silva sent this letter to journal editor Raymond Spier and to Stephanie Bird, an editorial board member assigned to the manuscript: Continue reading Publishing gadfly demands journal editor’s resignation, then has “fairly incomprehensible” paper rejected

Republished Seralini GMO-rat study was not peer-reviewed, says editor

env sci europeIn our coverage Tuesday of the republication of the controversial retracted study of GMOs and rats by Gilles Seralini and colleagues, we wrote this about a strange passage in an editor’s note on the paper:

The republished study was peer-reviewed, according to the press materials, and Seralini confirmed that it was in an email to Retraction Watch. But we were curious what “any kind of appraisal of the paper’s content should not be connoted” meant. We asked Seralini and the editor of Environmental Sciences Europe, Henner Hollert, but neither responded.

Hollert has responded to the same question from Nature, which reports: Continue reading Republished Seralini GMO-rat study was not peer-reviewed, says editor

Retracted Seralini GMO-rat study republished

env sci europeA highly controversial — and retracted — 2012 study by Gilles Seralini and colleagues of the effects of genetically modified maize and the Roundup herbicide on rats has been republished.

Retraction Watch readers may recall that the editor of Food and Chemical Toxicology decided to retract the heavily criticized paper because it was “inconclusive.” The editor, A. Wallace Hayes, claimed that this was consistent with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, although we and many others disagreed.

Here’s the original abstract of the Food and Chemical Toxicology paper, which has been cited 55 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Retracted Seralini GMO-rat study republished

Editor in chief steps down after being found plagiarizing in her own journal

diab met syndImagine you were a cop, sitting in your squad car at the side of the road with a radar gun, when you clock someone speeding. You turn on your lights, pull the speedster over to the side of the road, and walk to her driver’s side window.

Just as you say “Driver’s license and registration, please,” you realize the driver is your squad captain. Oops.

That must have been something like what it was like — with plagiarism detection software sitting in for the radar gun — for the co-editor-in-chief of Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome when he realized that Marilia de Brito Gomes, the other co-editor-in-chief, had published two papers in their journal that contained plagiarized passages.

Here’s the notice for “Historical facts of screening and diagnosing diabetes in pregnancy:” Continue reading Editor in chief steps down after being found plagiarizing in her own journal

De-coli: Plagiarism leads to retraction of highly cited recombinant protein paper

appliedmicrobioThe authors of a 2005 article on E. coli in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology have lost the paper because they recombined it from previous work.

The article, titled “Strategies for efficient production of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli,” came from a pair of biochemical engineers from the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, in New Delhi, India.

According to the abstract: Continue reading De-coli: Plagiarism leads to retraction of highly cited recombinant protein paper

Bee researcher in the Congo blames “injustice, segregation and colonialism” for retractions, Science correction

j insect conservationA bee researcher based in Congo has had two papers retracted, and a paper in Science corrected, for various reasons including unreliable data. The researcher, however, blames colonialism.

M. B. Théodore Munyuli is at the National Center for Research in Natural Sciences, CRSN-Lwiro, D.S. Bukavu, Kivu, and studies the distribution and diversity of bees. Here’s the notice from Psyche: A Journal of Entomology, for a paper on which Munyuli is the sole author: Continue reading Bee researcher in the Congo blames “injustice, segregation and colonialism” for retractions, Science correction