Alirio Melendez, the former National University of Singapore researcher who has already retracted two papers in the midst of an investigation into about 70 of his publications, has had a third retracted a third.
Here’s the notice from the Journal of Cellular Physiology: Continue reading Third retraction arrives for Alirio Melendez, this one in the Journal of Cellular Physiology
If you’re a rabbit and you haven’t figured out where to carry your cell phone, your front pocket is just fine.
That’s what you could reasonably infer from the retraction of a paper in the International Journal of Andrology purporting to show that mobile phones affected rabbits’ sperm counts. The notice, signed by the journal’s editor, Ewa Rajpert-De Meyts (we added links): Continue reading Rabbits needn’t worry about cell phones’ effects on their sperm count, say three retractions
The authors of a study allegedly showing that antidepressants prevent suicide have retracted it over unspecified errors. Here’s the notice:
At the request of the authors and in agreement with the Editor-in-Chief and Wiley-Blackwell, the following article “Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression”. Acta Psychiatr Scand 2010;122:454–460 has been retracted. The retraction has been requested and agreed due to unintentional errors in the analysis of the data presented.
The original paper linked “data on the toxicological detection of antidepressants in 18 922 suicides in Sweden 1992–2003” to “registers of psychiatric hospitalization as well as registers with sociodemographic data.” It found: Continue reading Authors retract paper claiming antidepressants prevent suicide
An ecology researcher in the Congo has found himself at the center of a plagiarism scandal that has felled seven of his papers.
As Science reports today, Serge Valentin Pangou’s work began unraveling in August 2011 after Wageningen University ecologist Patrick Jansen thought a paper he’d been asked to review for the International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation seemed familiar — because he’d written many of the same words in a 2007 paper in Conservation Biology. He ran the manuscript through the plagiarism detection software Turnitin, and sure enough, it was about 90% identical.
Unfortunately for Pangou, Jansen’s co-author on the Conservation Biology paper was Pierre-Michel Forget, whose father, as Science notes, “was a well-known private detective in France.” Forget and Jansen took a careful look at a number of Pangou’s papers, Continue reading Plagiarism leads to seven retractions (and counting) in the conservation literature
When a group from Saint Louis University published a case report in Pediatric Transplantation on a baby with an unusual infection after kidney transplant surgery, they thought they’d stumbled on a first. At the time they wrote:
[Acalculous candidal cholecystitis] caused by Candida is an uncommon entity usually seen in the critically ill. Here, we present the case of an 18-month-old renal transplant patient who developed candidal AAC during the post-operative period. Previous articles have addressed acalculous cholecystitis secondary to a variety of causes, or addressed a wide variety of Candida infections in the biliary tract, but this is the first discussion of cholecystitis caused by Candida without confounding factors such as biliary calculi or multiple pathogens. After the discussion of our patient’s case, we also reviewed the English-language literature regarding candidal AAC and discussed diagnosis, treatment, and mortality.
A year later, however, the group is walking back their article. A retraction notice in the journal states that: Continue reading On second thought: Transplant paper retracted for researcher error
A retraction notice from Tissue Antigens:
The following article from Tissue Antigens, A gene-specific primer extension and liquid bead array system for killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor genotyping by H. J. Park, Y. Oh, H. J. Kang, E. J. Han, H. Y. Shin, H. S. Ahn, K. S. Ahn, B. H. Yoon & B. D. Han, published online on 14 March 2011 in Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com) and in Tissue Antigens, 77:535–539, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor-in-Chief, James McCluskey, and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to inadvertent publication of the same article in a prior issue of the journal: Park, H. J., Oh, Y., Kang, H. J., Han, E. J., Shin, H. Y., Ahn, H. S., Ahn, K. S., Yoon, B. H. and Han, B. D. (2011), A gene-specific primer extension and liquid bead array system for killer-cell immunoglobulin-like receptor genotyping.Tissue Antigens, 77:251–256. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. accepts responsibility for this error. Continue reading Oops! Tissue Antigens retracts paper after accidentally publishing it twice
The journal Cancer has issued an Expression of Concern about two lung cancer screening papers long dogged by doubt.
Last April, The Cancer Letter and The New York Times jointly published an investigation into the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program (I-ELCAP) run by Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz. Other researchers had already criticized the design and conclusions of that trial, but as the investigation noted, an October 2008 review of the study found that the researchers couldn’t find 90 percent of the subjects’ consent forms, an ethical no-no that jeopardizes as many as 135 papers.
Two papers published in Cancer, in 2000 and 2001, are among those studies, according to the notice (links added), which credits the Times and The Cancer Letter and notes that the journal has referred the case to Federal investigators: Continue reading Cancer issues expression of concern about two Henschke I-ELCAP lung cancer screening papers
Is retracting a paper like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted?
Sadly, that’s a more apt metaphor than we’d like for a retraction in Equine Veterinary Journal of a short paper about efforts to save Przewalski’s horses, an endangered species closely related to domestic horses. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Neigh: Journal retracts brief endangered horse paper for mysterious reasons
Here’s a he said-he said that left one author with a publication, then nothing, and us scratching our heads.
In March 2010, the British Journal of Haematology issued a rather straightforward correction regarding a 2007 article by a group of researchers from Kansas Kansas City, Missouri.
The glitch? The manuscript evidently left out an author:
In Iyamu et al (2007), the list of authors was incorrectly published and should have read:
Efemwonkiekie W. Iyamu, Syed Jamal, Chiazotam Ekekezie and Gerald M. Woods
Or maybe not. The journal is now retracting the correction: Continue reading Lab squabble leads to retracted correction over authorship in British Journal of Haematology
A University of Ottawa lab has been forced to retract four papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) after an investigation of image manipulation.
According to an email from a university official obtained by Retraction Watch, a university investigative committee had “found substance to the allegations,” although it claimed it could not disclose details “due to their confidentiality.” The university requested that the JBC withdraw a November 2005 paper, and left it to the journal to “determine whether the other articles should also be withdrawn or if they can be corrected. ” And they took the issue to the agency that funded the work: Continue reading Following investigation, U Ottawa lab retracting four papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry