A group of physicists has retracted their preliminary report in the GCN Circular of a massive star-sized explosion after deciding that what they’d really observed was another phenomenon.
Although we could try to explain this, we’d rather leave it up to Giacomo Vianello, an experimental physicist at Stanford University, who was a member of the research team.
Vianello told us: Continue reading Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder where you went: Astronomy report retracted
A group of researchers at Istanbul University has swiftly retracted a paper they published in March in the British Journal of Cancer once it became clear that they were using the wrong antibody.
Here’s the notice for “Clinical significance of p95HER2 overexpression, PTEN loss and PI3K expression in p185HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients treated with trastuzumab-based therapies:” Continue reading Researchers retract breast cancer study after realizing they were using the wrong antibody
If we had a Retraction Watch headquarters (other than the diner where we occasionally meet for breakfast), we would have had to have closed up early today, because we both swooned when we saw a retraction notice from the Journal of Polish CIMAC this morning.
The notice, signed by the journal’s editor-in-chief Jerzy Girtler, of Gdansk University of Technology, reads:
Continue reading Miłość at first sight: A retraction notice worth emulating from Poland
The British Journal of Nutrition has retracted a 2013 paper by a group of researchers from Taiwan after learning that the authors had studied the wrong strain of microbe.
The article was titled “Oral Lactobacillus reuteri GMN-32 treatment reduces blood glucose concentrations and promotes cardiac function in rats with streptozotocin-induced diabetes mellitus.”
According to the abstract: Continue reading Lactobacillus intolerance: Bacterium mixup forces retraction
Blood has an interesting retraction of a 2011 paper on what a group of authors claimed was a new cell line — but which proved, apparently, to be a chimera.
The article, “Oxygen-regulated expression of the erythropoietin gene in the human renal cell line REPC,” came from a team at Universität Duisburg-Essen, in Germany, and has been cited 21 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the abstract: Continue reading Contaminated cells force retraction of Blood paper
A group of authors in China has retracted their December 2013 paper in PLoS ONE after realizing that they’d been studying the wrong cells.
The paper, “Up-Regulation of pVHL along with Down-Regulation of HIF-1α by NDRG2 Expression Attenuates Proliferation and Invasion in Renal Cancer Cells,” came from Lei Gao, of the Fourth Military Medical University, in Xi’an, and colleagues. It purported to find that:
Continue reading Wrong cell line leads to retraction of kidney cancer study
Last month, researchers published a paper whose conclusions suggested that looking at Arctic sea ice in the autumn offers clues to winter temperatures in Europe.
The letter appeared — briefly, as this post will demonstrate — in Nature Geoscience. The letter, titled “High predictability of the winter Euro–Atlantic climate from cryospheric variability,” was written by Javier Garcia-Serrano and Claude Frankignoul, of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. The journal published the letter on March 23 and retracted it on April 14.
Here’s the abstract, which can still be found online:
Continue reading Faulty model forces rapid retraction of paper on sea ice and climate change
The authors of a paper in Physical Review Letters have retracted it, after another researcher pointed out a mistake.
F. Sattin and D.F. Escande write in the notice for “Alfvénic Propagation: A Key to Nonlocal Effects in Magnetized Plasmas” (which is behind a paywall) that after the paper was published, they “we became aware of a fundamental error in the normalization of our equations.” Excerpt: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Physicists retract paper after becoming aware of “a fundamental error”
In a case whose irony is not lost on those involved, an article about publishing ethics has been retracted because one of the authors re-used material he’d written for an earlier piece. But the authors and the journal’s editors have turned the episode into a learning opportunity.
Here’s the notice for “Ethics and Integrity of the Publishing Process: Myths, Facts, and a Roadmap,” published in 2011 by Marshall Schminke and Maureen L. Ambrose: Continue reading Oh, the irony: Paper on “Ethics and Integrity of the Publishing Process” retracted for duplication
On Wednesday, we reported on a Nature retraction of a paper whose corresponding author had also had a Cell paper retracted, and had been found to have committed a “violation of academic integrity” by Utrecht University. Today, we present the back story of how those retractions came to be, from another co-author of both papers, Ben Scheres, of Wageningen University: Continue reading “I am deeply saddened and disturbed:” Co-author of retracted Nature paper reveals how problems came to light