Sometimes, retraction notices offer tantalizing clues, but no real information. Take the case of a paper called “Florid osseous dysplasia,” which was published last year in Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology by a group at Mumbai’s Nair Hospital Dental College and retracted recently.
Here’s the notice, which is suggestive but doesn’t say much: Continue reading Dental papers retracted after investigations find “issue with respect to misconduct”
The authors of a study on cancer incidence and survival in the Dutch migrant community have retracted it after realizing they’d made some errors that significantly affected the results.
But in what seems like an appropriate reward for coming forward, the newly analyzed data, with additional information, will be part of a forthcoming paper in another journal by the same authors.
The original retrospective study came out in May 2011 in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention and found that risk and survival of breast and stomach cancers differed depending on the person’s mother country. The problem was that the study jumbled up many of the participants’ homelands during the analysis.
The authors issued the following retraction: Continue reading Jumbled analysis leads to retraction of cancer study — but also another paper
The American Journal of the Medical Sciences has retracted a 2012 article on premature heartbeats by a group of authors in Missouri who took “significant” liberties with an earlier paper in Heart.
The offending paper, “Ventricular ectopic beats: an overview of management considerations, “was written by Amar Jadhav and colleagues at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, in Columbia, and published in the February issue of the AJMS.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Mizzou investigating faculty as one heart beats as two in plagiarized — and now retracted — cardiac paper
The June 2012 issue of Current Opinion in Critical Care has a retraction that might have been a rather mundane case of plagiarism but for the remarkably intertwined relationships of the authors of the publications involved.
Here’s the notice, which doesn’t attempt to broach the conflicts of interest (we can hardly blame them, as you’ll see): Continue reading He’s my editor, he’s my author, he’s my editor: A retraction reveals a tangled web
Current Opinion in Gastroenterology is a bimonthly journal “offering a unique and wide ranging perspective on the key developments in the field” that “features hand-picked review articles from our team of expert editors.”
Apparently, those hands picked what amounted to the same “unique” article twice. The journal is retracting a 2004 paper, “Enteral feeding,” by Khursheed Jeejeebhoy, an expert in nutrition at the University of Toronto (he’s now emeritus), because it duplicates a 2003 paper with the same title.
Here’s what the notice, which, lamentably, sits behind a paywall, has to say: Continue reading Gastro journal retracts duplicate review, but what really happened?
We knew we hadn’t heard the last of Joachim Boldt, whose nearly 90 retractions make him the putative record holder for a single author in this indistinguished club. But we didn’t expect this:
The European Journal of Anaesthesiology has retracted a paper, “Supplemental oxygen reduces serotonin levels in plasma and platelets during colorectal surgery and reduces postoperative nausea and vomiting,” from Boldt’s former colleagues at the Klinikum Ludwigshafen after determining that the authors were trying to hide their association with the disgraced anesthesiologist.
Continue reading Not so fast! Journal retracts paper from Boldt group over author hijinks, more
Silvia Bulfone-Paus, the Borstel Institute researcher who was forced to step down as institute director and has already retracted 12 papers, has retracted another, this one in Transplantation. Here’s the text of the notice: Continue reading Bulfone-Paus retraction count grows to 13 with one in Transplantation
In December, we reported on the case of William Hamman:
It’s a mind-boggling story: A United Airlines pilot claims to be a cardiologist and was eagerly sought after for medical conferences at which he taught doctors teamwork. He shared millions in grants, according to the Associated Press. But as the AP reports, William Hamman wasn’t a cardiologist at all, having never even finished medical school.
Hamman had published at least six papers using false credentials, including an MD and a PhD. In December, Jean Gayton Carroll, editor in chief of Quality Management in Health Care, told us that the journal would be “reviewing and evaluating” a paper by Hamman it published last year, “Using in situ simulation to identify and resolve latent environmental threats to patients safety: case study involving operational changes in a labor and delivery ward.” That review, we learned today, has led to a retraction.
According to the notice, which is refreshingly detailed (we added a link): Continue reading Remember William Hamman, the pilot who claimed to be a cardiologist? A retraction appears
Remember Spirocor, the Israeli company that closed down a clinical trial involving its “respiratory stress” test for coronary artery disease because the data underpinning the validity of the method proved unreliable? The problem led to the retraction of two articles, about which we’ve previously reported. But we also found a study by some of the same researchers, who include scientists in Israel and the United States, that had been presented at the 2010 meeting of the American Heart Association and published in the journal Circulation.
That abstract, No. 14426 “Accuracy and Usefulness of Finger Pulse Wave Analysis during Brief Deep Breathing Exercise (Respiratory Stress Response) as a Marker of Significant Coronary Artery Disease,” has now been retracted — making, to our knowledge, the entire body of published research on the Spirocor product an editorial memory.
Here’s the notice, which appears within the text of the abstract: Continue reading Another retraction of Spirocor research
As the news of Joachim Boldt’s staggering number of retractions leaps from Retraction Watch into the mainstream press, the consortium of journal editors retracting his studies has backtracked ever so slightly, announcing today that one of the 89 studies for which the German anesthesiologist lacked ethics approval in fact had such sanction.
According to the now-16 (Updated 3/7/11, as it is up from 11 several days ago) editors, LÄK-RLP, the German body investigating the ethics component of the Boldt case: Continue reading Joachim Boldt retraction tally drops by one, editors say (but record’s still safe)