Anil Potti‘s retraction count is now eight with the withdrawal of a 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Here’s the notice, which appeared online in JAMA sometime yesterday: Continue reading Potti and colleagues retract 2008 JAMA paper
What do you do when it turns out the materials you used in your successful experiment weren’t actually the materials you thought they were?
If you’re Peter Zammit, of King’s College London, and colleagues, you retract a 2008 paper in the Journal of Cell Science. Here’s the notice, for “B-catenin promotes self-renewal of skeletal-muscle satellite cells:” Continue reading Authors retract Journal of Cell Science study after realizing they were using the wrong gene constructs
The authors of a study in Urology that was at the center of two 2009 lawsuits brought by a company that funded the work have retracted the paper.
The idea behind the research — by Robert Getzenberg and colleagues at Johns Hopkins — was to find an alternative to the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, which many urologists recommend, but which many groups — including the US Preventive Services Task Force — find wanting. The work gave rise to a company, Onconome, Science reported in a 2009 story about the lawsuits: Continue reading Hopkins scientists retract prostate cancer screening study at center of 2009 lawsuits
Just days after the retraction of a paper in Science that had claimed a link between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and the virus XMRV, the authors of a similar paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have retracted theirs.
The PNAS paper, “Detection of MLV-related virus gene sequences in blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy blood donors,” was published online on August 23, 2010 by Shyh-Ching Lo, Harvey Alter, and colleagues. Here’s the notice, which PNAS says will be available on its site sometime this week: Continue reading Another shoe drops as authors retract PNAS chronic fatigue syndrome-virus paper
The editors of Science have fully retracted a study they published in 2009 alleging a link between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and the virus XMRV.
The notice begins with a nod to the reasons that the paper has already been partially retracted:
Science is fully retracting the Report “Detection of an infectious retrovirus, XMRV, in blood cells of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome” (1). Multiple laboratories, including those of the original authors (2), have failed to reliably detect xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus (XMRV) or other murine leukemia virus (MLV)–related viruses in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients. In addition, there is evidence of poor quality control in a number of specific experiments in the Report. Fig. 1, table S1, and fig. S2 have been retracted by the authors (3).
It also refers to evidence of image manipulation that was described by blogger Abbie Smith and then reported in the Chicago Tribune:
Continue reading Chronic fatigue syndrome-XMRV paper retracted by Science, completely this time
A good carpenter never blames his tools. But for scientists, sometimes machines do go bad–with disastrous results. Consider the following:
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has retracted two papers by researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States after the scientists learned that their results were based largely on a problem with their highly sensitive instruments.
When we broke the story last week about a juicy retraction notice in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) — known by its readers as “the Gray Journal” — we wrote that there was more to it than we suspected. That’s an understatement.
As we reported, the AJOG retracted an article that it had published earlier this year because 1) the author, Laurence Cole, had failed to disclose a potential financial conflict of interest with a pregnancy test maker named Church & Dwight; and 2) the article lacked a “credible scientific reason given for conducting the study,” along with other flaws detailed in the notice. (As we wrote the other day, we wonder why those issues did not arise during the initial review of the manuscript — but more on that shortly.)
We’ve since learned that the journal’s move came after it received a sharply worded letter from a high-powered San Francisco lawyer demanding immediate retraction of the article on the grounds that it represented a “substantial” threat to the financial health of his client. That client? A maker of home pregnancy tests who is now in the process of suing the very firm that provided Cole with research funding he failed to disclose.
First, here’s what Cole, the hormone expert at the University of New Mexico whose paper the journal retracted, said about why he didn’t disclose that funding: Continue reading Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat
When is a retraction not a retraction? Why, when it’s a correction, of course — like the one the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases issued this month:
In the article Reassortment of Ancient Neuraminidase and Recent Hemagglutinin in Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Virus (P. Bhoumik, A.L. Hughes), errors were made in selection of the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) sequences for the initial and subsequent data sets. As a result, the authors incorrectly concluded that the NA gene of the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus is of a more ancient lineage than the HA. Other researchers (and the authors) have not been able to reproduce the findings when using HA and NA matched pairs from viruses chosen on the basis of geography and time and correctly have pointed out errors in the data set that make the original conclusions invalid.
In other words, 1) the article was based largely on an error and 2) the central point could not be reproduced, two flaws that, at least in our book, usually constitute grounds for retraction.
The paper was written by Priyasma Bhoumik and Austin Hughes. Bhoumik, now a post-doc at Harvard, at the time was a PhD student at the University of South Carolina, where Hughes is a senior faculty member. Funding for the work came to Hughes from the National Institutes of Health, according to the original article.
We spoke with Hughes, who said that in this case, correction versus retraction is a distinction without a difference: Continue reading Retraction (in all but name) of flu paper raises eyebrows
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG) as a remarkable retraction notice in its November issue — the likes of which we haven’t seen before.
A little background: Earlier this year, Laurence Cole, an academic obstetrics specialist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, published a paper in the AJOG looking at the wide variability in the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, during pregnancy (we’d link to the article, but the journal has pulled it, so here’s the abstract on Medline).
Cole runs — or did run until recently, more on that in a moment — the USA hCG Reference Service at the university, which purports to be the only lab in the world that can measure all forms of hCG. He has published extensively in this area of research, with at least 125 papers to his name on the subject, according to a Medline search. One of his websites puts the figure at 246.
So Cole was definitely a known quantity to the journal editors when he submitted his manuscript and when it was published online in February of this year. That’ll be more important in a bit. But first, the retraction notice: Continue reading Ob-gyn journal pulls pregnancy test paper for undeclared conflict of interest, other problems
Last March, the journal Genomics retracted a paper, “Discovery of transcriptional regulators and signaling pathways in the developing pituitary gland by bioinformatic and genomic approaches,” for reasons that don’t really fit into a tight lede sentence. Let’s just say that at times the problems involved both questions of authorship and the validity of the research. More on all that in a moment.
Meanwhile, things change. Now the journal, an Elsevier title, is un-retracting (that can’t be a real word, can it?) the retraction. You’d think that would please the authors, and it does to an extent. But they also wonder, legitimately, whether the original retraction will refuse to relinquish its grip on the resurrected article and consign it to database oblivion.
First, some background. Continue reading Retracted retraction leaves Genomics paper intact — but authors wonder if anyone will know