Elsevier journal Chemosphere may finally retract a paper it learned contained fabricated data in January when a member of the author’s institution requested the paper be retracted.
Ludwigshafen Hospital, via Wikimedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Klinikum_Ludwigshafen_Nordseite.jpg
Update, 4 p.m. EST, 10/29/14: As a commenter points out, we didn’t quite get this one right. The Boldt paper that has been retracted was not previously retracted for lack of IRB approval. Rather, it was a heretofore unretracted article, from 1996, which German investigators have determined contained faked data. We’ve made edits below using strikethroughs, and have changed the headline to better reflect the content. We apologize for the errors.
We’ve commented before on the fact that we’ve noticed there’s often more to retractions whose stated reason is lack of institutional review board (IRB) approval. We can understand editors’ inclination to act as quickly as possible to issue a retraction, the scientific publishing equivalent of jailing Al Capone for tax evasion. But we appreciate it even more when said editors return to the scene of the crime, as it were, when new important details come out.
Case in point: Anesthesia & Analgesia has amended its retraction of a 2009 1996 study by Joachim Boldt — who with nearly 90 retractions once held the record in that department — based on findings that the data in that paper were fabricated.
The article was titled “Cardiopulmonary bypass priming using a high dose of a balanced hydroxyethyl starch versus an albumin-based priming strategy,” “The effects of albumin versus hydroxyethyl starch solution on cardiorespiratory and circulatory variables in critically ill patient.” had previously been retracted because Boldt had failed to obtain adequate ethics approval for the research. But now comes this, According to the retraction notice from editor in chief Steven Shafer: Continue reading Boldt’s data were fake in 1996 paper
A group of researchers from Egypt has lost their 2013 article on hepatitis C in the Journal of Immunoassay and Immunochemistry for fudging their figures.
Case Reports in Dentistry has pulled a 2014 article about an oral parasitic infection (caution: not pretty) after learning that the authors were not exactly honest about their work.
Want bogus data, million-dollar fraud allegations and a scientist on the lam? We give you Alain Malafosse.
The British Journal of Psychiatry has retracted a June 2013 paper by Malafosse and his colleagues on the genetics of bipolar disorder in children because Malafosse allegedly fabricated key data in the study.
The article, “Childhood maltreatment and methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1 in bipolar disorder,” purported to find that people with bipolar disorder who had experienced more, and more severe, abuse early in life were more likely to show epigenetic changes. According to the abstract:
The authors of a Journal of Experimental Medicine have retracted it, blaming the first author for data and figure manipulation.
The paper, “The requirements for natural Th17 cell development are distinct from those of conventional Th17 cells,” was initially published in September 2011 and has been cited 25 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. First author Jiyeon Kim was an MD-PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania until this year, according to a LinkedIn profile.
Nasser Chegini, an ob-gyn formerly on the faculty at the University of Florida who has been the subject of an Office of Research Integrity (ORI) inquiry for several years, has a second retraction.
Chegini is suspected of having used bogus data in some of his work — research backed in part by some $4 million in federal funding.
