A materials scientist in Turkey has retracted a paper in the journal Tetrahedron after realizing that there was more to the compounds he was studying than he thought.
The article, “Novel donor–acceptor type thiophene pyridine conjugates: synthesis and ion recognition features,” appeared in April and was written by Fatih Algi, of the Laboratory of Organic Materials at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Author retracts materials paper for irreproducibility
As the bumper sticker says, “Regime change starts at home.” Seems to be the case with scientists these days.
This month we have seen commendable instances of researchers retracting papers after identifying flaws in their own data — an outbreak of integrity that has us here at Retraction Watch applauding. (We’ve even created a new category, “doing the right thing,” at the suggestion of a reader.)
Today’s feel-good story comes from the lab of Karl Svoboda, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, in Ashburn, Va. Back in June, Svoboda and his colleagues published “Whisker Dynamics Underlying Tactile Exploration,” in the Journal of Neuroscience. Here’s what the abstract had to say about the study:
Continue reading It’s an epidemic! Another group does the right thing, retracting neuroscience paper
We’ll say it again: We like being able to point out when researchers stand up and do the right thing, even at personal cost.
In December 2011, Pamela C. Ronald, of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues published a paper in PLOS ONE,”Small Protein-Mediated Quorum Sensing in a Gram-Negative Bacterium.” Such quorum sensing research is a “hot topic” right now, so not surprisingly the paper caught the attention of other scientists, and the media, including the Western Farm Press. The study has been cited eight times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
One of those scientists who took notice was Ronald’s UC Davis colleague Jonathan Eisen, who posted about the paper on his blog. That was on January 9, 2012. But if you go to that post today, you’ll see that Eisen struck through most of it, and added this comment: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Researchers retract quorum sensing paper after public process
What do you do when new experiments show that you interpreted the data from your old experiments the wrong way?
Some scientists might just shrug and sweep those errors — and their previous papers — under the rug. But when it happened to Jeffery Kelly, of the Scripps Research Institute, and his colleagues, they decided to retract their earlier work.
Here’s the abstract of their new paper (we bolded a few sentences for emphasis): Continue reading Doing the right thing: Researchers retract two studies when they realize they misinterpreted data
It was the last study ever published from prominent scientist Gerd Maul’s lab. And now it’s been retracted.
Maul was a highly cited cell biologist, with 30 papers cited at least 100 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. He was also a well-known sculptor. When he died in 2010, he had a paper under submission at Cancer Research, which was published late that year.
This year, however, his co-authors found problems with the study. And as the notice — one of the most detailed we’ve ever seen — explains: Continue reading A sad postscript: Paper by deceased researcher retracted
We have knocked the Journal of Biological Chemistry in the past for what we believed to be needless — and unhelpful — obfuscation. And more recently, we have praised the journal for taking what we believe to be positive steps in the direction of greater transparency.
Here, again, we come not to bury JBC but to praise it.
The journal has issued a retraction for a 2011 article by a group of researchers in London, England, led by Stephen Perkins. The paper, “The solution structure of heparan sulfate differs from that of heparin,” purported to show that:
Continue reading Retraction of JBC heparan paper shows much to like
The authors of a paper on quorum sensing — in simple terms, how bacteria “talk” to one another — have retracted it after another group’s findings led them to discover that the mixture they used weren’t what they thought.
The refreshingly detailed retraction notice in PLOS ONE explains: Continue reading Quorum sensing paper retracted when new study suggests compounds weren’t what they seemed
Amid an ongoing investigation, a group of psychology researchers at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium have taken a painful decision to retract a paper now that they’ve realized there were serious problems with one aspect of the work.
Here’s the notice for “The Emergence of Orthographic Word Representations in the Brain: Evaluating a Neural Shape-Based Framework Using fMRI and the HMAX Model,” by Wouter Braet, Jonas Kubilius, Johan Wagemans, and Hans P. Op de Beeck: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Psychology researchers retract after realizing data “were not analyzed properly”
For the second time inside of a week, we come to praise scientists who did the right thing when they realized their lab equipment or reagents weren’t performing as expected.
Here’s the retraction of a 2011 paper in Cerebral Cortex: Continue reading Scientists doing the right thing: Malfunctioning lab equipment leads to retraction of neuroscience paper
They say that a poor workman blames his tools. If you’re a scientist and you discover your tools don’t do exactly what you thought they did, however, the right thing to do is let other scientists relying on your work know.
That’s what the University of Auckland’s Nigel Birch and colleagues did recently, after a 2012 study they published in the Journal of Neurochemistry didn’t hold up. Here’s the notice, which we’d consider a model for retractions everywhere: Continue reading A model retraction in the Journal of Neurochemistry for “unexpected effect” of a filter