Category: doing the right thing

Authors ask Science to retract Hayabusa asteroid paper

jaxa_logoThe Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has requested that Science retract a 2006 paper about the makeup of asteroid Itokawa as observed from the spacecraft Hayabusa, the news section of Science reports.

Instead of calibrating their equipment on Earth, the scientists assumed they’d see both magnesium and silicon in the x-ray spectra, and used that assumption to assess the rest of the chemical composition of the asteroid.

The paper may be based on faulty assumptions, but the conclusions have been backed up by other published papers, according to the Science magazine report: Continue reading Authors ask Science to retract Hayabusa asteroid paper

Diabetes researchers retract, correct and republish study on mortality rates

diabetologiaA diabetes paper that received quite a bit of media attention when it was published in June 2013 was retracted and reissued to fix data errors shortly after publication.

The paper, which showed a steep decline in mortality rates for diabetics in Ontario, Canada, and the UK between 1996 and 2009, was republished in December 2013, with the same conclusion and the errors corrected.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Mortality trends in patients with and without diabetes in Ontario, Canada and the UK from 1996 to 2009: a population-based study”: Continue reading Diabetes researchers retract, correct and republish study on mortality rates

Paper on liver failure in babies withdrawn for lab mix-up

jpgnA paper on liver failure in infants has been retracted due to a lab error, though the author contends that the paper still holds a valuable message for pediatricians — one that could save lives.

To get to that, though, we had to make it through what turns out to be an unnecessarily vague retraction notice (more on that in a moment) in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology & Nutrition:
Continue reading Paper on liver failure in babies withdrawn for lab mix-up

Article about alcohol withdrawal withdrawn

A stumble in data preparation earned a retraction for a paper on delirium tremensalcohol_and_alcoholism, a life-threatening side effect of alcohol withdrawal that spans a wide range of symptoms, including hallucinations and seizures.

Though the initial retraction notice was extremely unhelpful, the author stepped in to give us a better picture of the errors that led to the paper’s demise.

Here’s the notice from Alcohol and Alcoholism about “Biochemical Predictors of Delirium Tremens in Patients in Alcohol Withdrawal”:

Continue reading Article about alcohol withdrawal withdrawn

Incorrect analysis leads to Nature’s sixth retraction in 2014

nature 714In what seems to be an example of researchers swiftly and transparently correcting the literature, and acknowledging errors, a pair of scientists have retracted a 2013 paper from Nature.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Genomic organization of human transcription initiation complexes,” by Bryan Venters and Frank Pugh: Continue reading Incorrect analysis leads to Nature’s sixth retraction in 2014

Patient mix-up sinks prenatal supplement paper

This one seems like an honest mistake: a paper on dietary supplements during pregnancy has been retracted based on an error in data recording.

In the BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth paper, “Folic acid supplementation, dietary folate intake during pregnancy and risk for spontaneous preterm delivery: a prospective observational cohort study,” women for whom the researchers had no data on folic acid supplementation were classified as taking no supplements. Despite the error, the authors claim the overall conclusion remains the same: taking folic acid supplements didn’t protect women from preterm deliveries.

Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Patient mix-up sinks prenatal supplement paper

Authors issue their own expression of concern about elephant femur paper

interfaceThe authors of a 2012 paper in the journal Interface have had the journal issue an expression of concern about it after issues with “some of the data and methods” came to light.

Here’s the expression of concern for “What makes an accurate and reliable subject-specific finite element model? A case study of an elephant femur:” Continue reading Authors issue their own expression of concern about elephant femur paper

Dipping into history: An 87-year-old retraction in a statistics journal

jamstatsocWe came across a rather long-toothed retraction in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, which represents a case of doing the right thing (similar to that involving the apparent first-ever English language retraction from 1756, about which we wrote in 2012).

The 1927 notice came in the form of a letter by C. H. Whelden Jr., who was for a time the chief statistician for the American National Red Cross, referencing his 1926 article in the JASA,”The Trend-Seasonal Normal in Time Series:”

Continue reading Dipping into history: An 87-year-old retraction in a statistics journal

Author steps in to clarify vague tuberculosis retraction

You’ve got to love when an author is willing to detail the specifics of an unhelpful retraction notice.

This May, a paper came out in Journal of Thoracic Diseases about drug-resistant tuberculosis. It was retracted in June, for “some misconduct in the manuscript.”

Here’s the notice:

The article “Application status of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry in the identification and drug resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis” (doi: 10.3978/j.issn.2072-1439.2014.02.19) that appeared on page 512-516 of the May 2014 issue of the Journal of Thoracic Disease needs to be withdrawn due to some misconduct in the manuscript. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Since that’s pretty vague and unhelpful, we reached out to corresponding author Jiayun Liu, who gave us a thorough rundown:

Continue reading Author steps in to clarify vague tuberculosis retraction

If only more retractions could be like this: Authors of cardiac stem cell paper show the way

Researchers at Qingdao University have fully retracted a paper originally published in Molecular Medicine Reports with a clear, detailed outline of what went wrong and how they discovered the error.

Here’s the notice for “Generation of induced pluripotent stem cells using skin fibroblasts from patients with myocardial infarction under feeder-free conditions:”

Continue reading If only more retractions could be like this: Authors of cardiac stem cell paper show the way