The Journal of Advanced Nursing has retracted a 2006 paper by a group of authors in Hong Kong who lifted much of the text from a previous article of theirs in a competing publication.
The article, “Osteoporosis prevention education programme for women,” came from Moon Fai Chan and C.Y. Ko in the School of Nursing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Per the abstract:
Continue reading “Major overlap” forces retraction of osteoporosis paper
The author of a 2012 paper in Anaesthesia which offered the statistical equivalent of coffin nails to the case against record-breaking fraudster Yoshitaka Fujii (currently at the top of our leaderboard) has written a new article in which he claims to have improved upon his approach.
As we’ve written previously, John Carlisle, an anesthesiologist in the United Kingdom, analyzed nearly 170 papers by Fujii and found aspects of the reported data to be astronomically improbable. It turns out, however, that he made a mistake that, while not fatal to his initial conclusions, required fixing in a follow-up paper, titled “Calculating the probability of random sampling for continuous variables in submitted or published randomised controlled trials,” also published in Anaesthesia.
According to the abstract:
There may be some deeply rooted issues in the work of high-profile plant biologist Olivier Voinnet, biology department research director at ETH in Zurich. Corrections have continued to pile up months after his work was hit with a barrage of criticism on PubPeer. We’ve tracked a total of seven corrections over the past five months (not including the April retraction of a 2004 paper in The Plant Cell). One of the corrected papers also received an Expression of Concern this week.
Collectively, the corrected papers have accumulated more than 1200 citations.
In January, Voinnet said he planned to correct multiple papers, after receiving “an anonymous email.”
One of the recent corrections we found is for a 2003 article in The Plant Journal, “An enhanced transient expression system in plants based on suppression of gene silencing by the p19 protein of tomato bushy stunt virus,” which details using proteins from a tomato virus to help alter gene expression. The study has been cited 862 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the correction notice, posted June 8:
Bone anatomists have retracted two papers on primate jawbone structure from the Journal of Anatomy due to “errors in the validation protocol and data,” marking the fourth retraction for one of the authors.
Olga Panagiotopoulou retracted two other papers over the past year, all of which were due to a common methodological problem. As Panagiotopoulou — who completed the work in the UK, before joining the University of Queensland in Australia in 2013 — explained to us in April,
Continue reading Two more retractions make four for bone researcher
A natural disaster is to blame for a retraction about lethal brain tumors. At least, that’s where the authors say the problem started: with a 2010 earthquake that caused a loss of “substantial data.”
The paper, “Superoxide-dependent uptake of vitamin C in human glioma cells,” looks at how the cells of lethal brain tumors interact with the vitamin commonly used to reduce side effects of therapies.
Post earthquake, someone digitally filled in a western blot analysis of proteins from a cell line and rat brains, as a “temporary solution.” And then the temporary solution made its way into the Journal of Neurochemistry.
Here’s the retraction note from the journal, including an image of the sneaky western blot:
A 2012 article published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences is being retracted because of an “overlap with a previous publication by the same authors.”
The corresponding author, Heba Yassa, a lecturer at Assiut University in Egypt, readily explained in an email exchange that the mix-up was due to a miscommunication with the editor of another journal, which she believed was not going to publish the article. “I know accidentally that the editor…published the article.”
The article, which examined suicides in one of the largest provinces in Egypt between 2005 and 2009, found rates had gone up since 1987, and men tended to use more violent methods than women.
Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Article on suicide in Egypt retracted for double publication
Authors of a 2010 Chemistry – A European Journal article have retracted it “due to the wrong assignment of structure” of catalysts.
The retraction is the third, by our count, for corresponding author Doo Ok Jang, a chemist at Yonsei University in Wonju. Jang authored one of the previously retracted papers with Sung Jun Kim and the other with Sang Yoon Kim. Both papers were also sunk by misassigned structures.
The current study, “Enantioselective Radical Addition to Ketimines: A Synthetic Route Towards α,α-Disubstituted α-Amino Acids,” is authored by all three chemists. Here’s the retraction notice:
Continue reading Third structure slip-up for chemist in Korea yields retraction
A urologist in Iran has lost three papers in BJU International, bringing his retraction count to a half-dozen.
In December 2013, we reported on three retractions by Mohammad Reza Safarinejad. None of those notices, about papers related to incontinence and erectile dysfunction, made the reasons for retraction very clear. After that post ran, Safarinejad told us that Hartmut Porst, former president of the European Society for Sexual Medicine, had raised questions about the data in a number of his papers. Porst confirmed that for us earlier this month.
All of the latest papers, about aspects of male sexual dysfunction, are being retracted due to “inappropriate” statistical analyses.
Here’s the notice for “Analysis of association between the 5-HTTLPR and STin2 polymorphisms in the serotonin-transporter gene and clinical response to a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (sertraline) in patients with premature ejaculation,” which has been cited 17 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Urology researcher in Iran up to six retractions
Bone researcher Olga Panagiotopoulou of the University of Queensland has lost a second paper over “errors in the validation protocol and data.”
The retracted paper in the Journal of Biomechanics, about primate jaws, was subject to an expression of concern in May 2014 November 2013, one of two Panagiotopoulou’s group issued last year over methodological problems. The other paper was later retracted. According to Panagiotopoulou, there will be two more retractions forthcoming, both in the Journal of Anatomy.
According John Hutchinson, last author of the other retracted paper, that withdrawal was the result of an investigation at his school, the Royal Veterinary College.
Panagiotopoulou emailed us with an explanation:
Chemists at Lanzhou University in China did the right thing last month, retracting a paper in Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis because of issues with a reactant that could only be corrected by changing “all the text and quantities.”
When the scientists were adding what was labeled Reactant 1 to the mix, they believed it was α-ethoxycarbonyl-α-azido-N-phenylacetamides. Unfortunately, what they were actually using was a decomposed version of the molecule, which threw everything off.
Here’s the notice for “tert-Butyl Hydroperoxide and Tetrabutylammonium Iodide- Promoted Free Radical Cyclization of α-Azido-N-arylamides”: Continue reading Molecular mixup burns chemistry paper