Category: doing the right thing

A team of researchers in Belgium got more than they expected when they tried to study potato pathogens: an unwelcome contaminant, a retraction, and a new paper the authors say is “an improvement over the first.”

In a now-retracted paper in Metallomics originally published in January 2024, researchers at the University of Liège described how availability of nitrogen and iron changes how the bacterium responsible for potato common scab interacts with each of the two microorganisms responsible for early and late blight while infecting the same host. The results suggested the bacterium had antimicrobial properties against both microbes, with nearly all of the experiments focusing on the fungus that causes late blight. 

After publication, the authors realized their strain of the late blight-causing microorganism was not the one described in the paper. While the lab originally received the correct strain, “the plates became contaminated, and the fungal contaminant eventually overgrew the strain we intended to study,” Sébastien Rigali, corresponding author and professor at the University of Liège, told Retraction Watch. 

A team of physicists has retracted a paper from Science after they discovered mistakes in their data and statistical analysis when following up on their work.

The paper “A room-temperature single-photon source based on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms” published in 2018, garnered 117 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Of these, 97 citations came after the authors corrected the paper in 2020 to adjust for updated calibrations, which they said did not affect the conclusions of the article. 

This correction was unrelated to the reasons for retraction, said corresponding author Tilman Pfau, a professor of physics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper in Current Biology reporting on what they said was a lungless water-loving frog in Borneo. 

According to David Bickford, then of the National University of Singapore, and his colleagues, the Bornean flat-headed frog “breathed” the way most salamanders do:  by absorbing oxygen through their skin or, during earlier phases of life for some species, through gills. (We’re not salamander experts, so if this characterization is a bit crude, don’t come for us.) Because the frog lived in fast-moving streams, the researchers reasoned, it could obtain adequate oxygen to meet its needs.

For the last 15-odd years, that understanding held. But in May, another team of herpetologists, using more sophisticated tools, said they’ve found evidence of lungs – tiny but functional – in the creatures. As the New Scientist magazine reported earlier this year:

Retractions are the stuff of nightmares for most academics. But they aren’t necessarily a career obstacle, and sometimes may be the only way forward, according to Andrew P. Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department of Reed College, in Portland, Ore. Last month, the journal Evolution pulled and replaced a study Anderson had conducted as a PhD student under Adam G. Jones at the University of Idaho, in Moscow. The study’s findings suggested sexual selection shaped the responsiveness of the human genome to male sex hormones. Below is a lightly edited Q&A we did with Anderson about his experience.

Retraction Watch (RW): In the summer of 2022, shortly after your paper was first published, you realized it contained a significant error. What happened?