Category: springer retractions

Cryptic “legal issues” lead to retraction of paper about potential Novartis alcohol abuse drug

Readers of this blog by now know that if there’s one thing that really gets us going, it’s obfuscation. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the following retraction notice from the journal Psychopharmacology, made us particularly batty:

This paper has been retracted by the author because of legal issues.

The notice refers to  “Selective activation of the metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 7 “mGluR7” attenuates acquisition, expression, and reinstatement of ethanol place preference,” was published online in late June by Amine Bahi under the heading “Original Investigation.”

Bahi is in the department of anatomy at United Arab Emirates University. He has also held positions at Yale and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Among his publications is one that involved a collaborator from Novartis (more on that in a moment). Continue reading Cryptic “legal issues” lead to retraction of paper about potential Novartis alcohol abuse drug

Resurrection? Paper about Jesus and the flu remains online, not marked as retracted

In August, we reported on the retraction of a paper in Virology Journal about whether a woman allegedly cured by Jesus Christ had the flu or some other ailment. The original paper was published on July 21, 2010. On August 11, after a flurry of criticism from various bloggers, the journal’s editor, Robert Garry, apologized for publishing it in a comment. On the 13th, the journal published a retraction notice.

But as an eagle-eyed Retraction Watch reader has pointed out, the original paper, and its abstract, both remain online, without any suggestion that the paper was retracted. We found that puzzling, so we called Garry, of Tulane’s department of microbiology and immunology. Continue reading Resurrection? Paper about Jesus and the flu remains online, not marked as retracted

Fraud by Naoki Mori claims another paper, this one in a journal whose board he sits on

Late last month we wrote about a handful of retractions involving Naoki Mori, a promising Japanese cancer researcher who appears to have built a CV with the help of fabricated evidence.

The fraud earned Mori a 10-year publishing ban from the American Society of Microbiology, which publishes Infection and Immunity. There were two other retractions in Blood, from the American Society of Hematology.

Now, another journal has joined the party. Continue reading Fraud by Naoki Mori claims another paper, this one in a journal whose board he sits on

Irony alert: Shades of plagiarism undo med ethics paper on terminal care

With some conservatives fulminating over President Obama’s eternal lust for “death panels,” we have our own case of end-of-life outrage to report.

BMC Medical Ethics has retracted a November 2010 paper by two authors from Mayo Clinic whose manuscript — “End-of-life discontinuation of destination therapy with cardiac and ventilatory support medical devices: physician-assisted death or allowing the patient to die?” — contained passages that closely echoed those in another article, “Moral fictions and medical ethics,” published online in July 2009 in the journal Bioethics.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Irony alert: Shades of plagiarism undo med ethics paper on terminal care

Errors, phantom author, retraction? It’s enough to set your teeth on edge

 

Photo by mattlemmon via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/mplemmon/

 

Authorship issues, sloppy science, deception — more often than not, at least one of these is at the heart of a retracted paper. But it’s rare when all three are involved. Which, of course, means that such a case is precisely what we’re about to deliver.

The Journal of Medical Case Reports, a BioMed Central title, recently retracted an intriguing item about a young man who developed a condition called pubic osteomyelitis after becoming infected with Streptococcus viridans following oral surgery to pull a wisdom tooth. As the authors, from Great Britain, explained in their 2008 paper describing the episode: Continue reading Errors, phantom author, retraction? It’s enough to set your teeth on edge

Missing authors: Journal retracts article showing stinky dairy products make good mosquito bait

Citing “authorship” issues, a parasitology journal has retracted a paper by a Kenyan scientist which showed that Limburger cheese and milk cream may be effective mosquito bait.

The paper, by Eunice Owino, of the University of Nairobi, was published online in Parasites & Vectors this June but retracted in late August after the editors quickly learned that Owino had neglected to list several other authors on her manuscript.

According to Chris Arme, a parasitologist and editor-in-chief of the journal, the article began to smell like Lim … well, you know, immediately: Continue reading Missing authors: Journal retracts article showing stinky dairy products make good mosquito bait

The shroud of retraction: Virology Journal withdraws paper about whether Christ cured a woman with flu

Jesus healing a bleeding woman, courtesy http://campus.belmont.edu/honors/CatPix/womanblood.jpg via Wikipedia

It takes decades, and even centuries, to overturn the Catholic canon of law, but medical journals move much more quickly: Just three weeks after the Virology Journal published a paper speculating that a woman described in the Bible as being “cured by our Lord Jesus Christ” had flu, the journal has apologized for ever posting it online.

After bemused — to put it mildly — reactions from bloggers Bob O’Hara (who alerted us to the retraction), P.Z. Myers, and Tara C. Smith, as well as questions from a journal reader, the journal’s editor, Robert F. Garry, posted a retraction to O’Hara’s blog, and in his own journal: Continue reading The shroud of retraction: Virology Journal withdraws paper about whether Christ cured a woman with flu