Category: not reproducible

Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error

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Authors have retracted a highly cited Nature letter that purported to discover a much sought-after, stable light source from quantum dots, after they realized the light was actually coming from another source: the glass the dots were affixed to.

When the paper “Non-blinking semiconductor nanocrystals” was published in 2009, it received some media coverage, such as in Chemistry World. That’s partly because very small sources of “non-blinking” light could have wide-ranging, big-picture applications, author Todd Krauss, a physical chemist at the University of Rochester, told us:

Off the top of my head, a quantum computer. Quantum cryptography is another one. People want a stable light source that obeys quantum physics, instead of classic physics.

The retraction note, published Wednesday, explains how the researchers found out the effect was coming from the glass, not quantum dots:

Continue reading Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error

Duplicated data, “careless errors” expire lung cancer paper

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A paper about the molecular details of lung cancer is being retracted for repeating datasets and “careless errors” in a pair of figures.

According to the note, the editor of Carcinogenesis wouldn’t have known about the problems if he hadn’t been tipped off that the paper by first author, XiaoJuan Sun — a researcher at Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital in China — shared “significant similarities” with another one of Sun’s papers that was retracted years ago. After the journal investigated the paper, it discovered that the authors had reported the same data as in the retracted paper “without significant additions or amendments,” along with some errors and inconsistencies.

Here’s the detailed note for “The EDA-containing cellular fibronectin induces epithelial mesenchymal transition in lung cancer cells through integrin α9β1-mediated activation of PI3-K /Akt and Erk1/2:”

Continue reading Duplicated data, “careless errors” expire lung cancer paper

BMJ corrects controversial critique of US dietary guidelines report

downloadThe BMJ has published a correction to a critique of the U.S. dietary guidelines report that has received heavy criticism from nutrition experts.

The author, journalist Nina Teicholz, has also posted a response to the criticism of the article.

The BMJ investigation, released in September, asserted that the guidelines committee used “weak scientific standards” to make its recommendations. It also criticized several aspects of the new expert report for the guidelines, such as “deleting meat from the list of foods recommended as part of its healthy diets.”

Soon after the feature appeared, The Verge — who first reported the news of the correction this week — called it “bogus.” The BMJ quickly issued a “clarification” to the paper, in the “rapid response” section of the paper (the journal’s version of a comment section). It noted that the feature should have specified “lean” meats.

The new, official, correction doesn’t formally put the clarification on the record. Instead, it addresses the research behind the analysis about saturated fats. Here it is in full:

Continue reading BMJ corrects controversial critique of US dietary guidelines report

Taste researcher falsified data in two papers: ORI

ori-logoA federal report has found that a former University of Maryland postdoc “falsified and/or fabricated” data in two papers about taste receptors.

The Office of Research Integrity report found that Maria C.P. Geraedts manipulated bar graphs in the papers to “produce the desired result.” Both have been retracted. Geraedts left academia in 2014, and is now a science writer.

We reported on one retraction in July, “Gustatory stimuli representing different perceptual qualities elicit distinct patterns of neuropeptide secretion from taste buds,” published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The other, “Transformation of postingestive glucose responses after deletion of sweet taste receptor subunits or gastric bypass surgery,” published in 2012 in the American Journal of Physiology Endocrinology and Metabolism, was retracted in September. Here’s the note, which cites the university’s investigation: Continue reading Taste researcher falsified data in two papers: ORI

Bone researcher manipulated data in JAMA study, says investigation

Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 10.53.53 AMA bone researcher manipulated data in a 2011 JAMA study about an inexpensive treatment for osteoporosis. That’s the conclusion of an investigation at the researcher’s former workplace, the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, the Toronto Star reports.

The study — led and manipulated by Sophie Jamal — followed 243 women over two years, as they applied nitroglycerin ointment once a day. The ointment is currently used to prevent chest pain and treat anal fissure pain by relaxing blood vessels; Jamal’s study concluded it could help patients with osteoporosis, too:

Among postmenopausal women, nitroglycerin ointment modestly increased [bone mineral density] and decreased bone resorption.

But even the modest effect was too good to be true. Continue reading Bone researcher manipulated data in JAMA study, says investigation

Failure to reproduce key experiments retracts cancer study

Medical OncologyA group of Chinese cancer researchers has retracted a paper in Medical Oncology after they discovered that “several key experiments” were not reproducible.

The paper, “Decreased Warburg effect induced by ATP citrate lyase suppression inhibits tumor growth in pancreatic cancer,” was published in March. It found that suppressing the enzyme ATP citrate lyase could be used to treat pancreatic cancer.

However, the authors decided to pull the paper when some of the findings couldn’t be reproduced. 

Here’s the notice:

Continue reading Failure to reproduce key experiments retracts cancer study

Much of preclinical research into one cancer drug is flawed, says report

elife-identity-headerA review of preclinical research of a now widely used cancer drug suggests the studies contain multiple methodology flaws and overestimate the benefits of the drug.

Specifically, the researchers found that most studies didn’t randomize treatments, didn’t blind investigators to which animals were receiving the drug, and tested tumors in only one animal model, which limits the applicability of the results. Importantly, they also found evidence that publication bias — keeping studies that found no evidence of benefit from the drug, sunitinib, out of the literature — may have caused a significant overestimation of its effects on various tumor types.

Together, these findings suggest the need for a set of standards that cancer researchers follow, the journal notes in a “digest” of the paper, published Tuesday by eLife:
Continue reading Much of preclinical research into one cancer drug is flawed, says report

Nature: No plans to change wording of STAP retractions

cover_nature (2)Despite acknowledging in its own pages that two recent high-profile retraction notices turned out to not tell the whole story, Nature will not be updating the original retraction notices, the journal tells us.

We checked in with Nature after it published two Brief Communications Arising regarding two high-profile retractions of papers describing a new method of reprogramming cells to a pluripotent state. (This method is also known as stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP.)

We were particularly intrigued by the journal’s plans for the retractions, published in 2014, when an editorial in the September 23 issue about the new BCAs (here and here) suggested the wording of the notices might be problematic: Continue reading Nature: No plans to change wording of STAP retractions

13th retraction issued for Jesús Ángel Lemus

Proceedings of the Royal Society B- Biological SciencesA 13th retraction has been published for Jesús Ángel Lemus, the Spanish veterinary researcher whose work colleagues have had trouble verifying.

This paper was pulled for similar reasons as his other retractions: After retrying the experiments in two independent labs, fellow authors were “unable to arrive to any sound conclusion about the validity of his analyses.” 

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences posted the notice September 16, three years after the paper received an expression of concern.

The retraction notice, signed by every co-author but Lemus, reads:

Continue reading 13th retraction issued for Jesús Ángel Lemus

50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?

Georg Wittig
Georg Wittig

It’s not often that an article is retracted only to be later proven correct. But that may have happened this past summer in the chemistry literature.

In July, a group of researchers recapitulated an experiment largely similar to one that Nobelist Georg Wittig had performed – and subsequently retracted — decades earlier. Their findings suggest Wittig may actually have gotten it right the first time.

On July 27, Peter Chen of ETH Zurich and colleagues published an article online in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition that describes a new method for appending a carbon atom to an unsaturated hydrocarbon to create a three-membered ring – a useful chemical transformation known as cyclopropanation. Yet, it was not the first time researchers had reported such a process. As Chen and his colleagues note in the Israel Journal of Chemistry, Georg Wittig of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (who would go on to win the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1979) and Volker Franzen reported a similar reaction in 1960 in Angewandte Chemie, a German-language publication. Continue reading 50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?