Category: by reason for retraction

Autism genetics papers retracted after fraud inquiry at NY research agency

GBBcoverA fraud investigation at a New York state research institution has led to two retractions of papers looking at genetic links to autism.

The 2011 papers, which appeared in Genes, Brain and Behavior, involve work conducted at the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities’ (OPWDD’s) Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, on Staten Island. The last author on both articles is Xiaohong Li, head of the institute’s cellular neurobiology laboratory.

Cell line mixup causes retraction of paper on blood vessel damage

britjournnutWe’ve written before about retractions for cell lines that turn out not to be what researchers thought they were. In a few cases, that has involved contamination by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks. Today, we note the retraction of a paper whose authors, from Taiwan, thought they were using human muscle cells that line blood vessels when they were actually studying such cells from rat embryos.

Here’s the notice in the British Journal of Nutrition for “Molecular mechanism of green microalgae, Dunaliella salina, involved in attenuating balloon injury-induced neointimal formation”: Continue reading Cell line mixup causes retraction of paper on blood vessel damage

Cost-sharing paper that shared too much with other works earns retraction

hepThe journal Higher Education Policy has retracted an article it published last year by a scholar in Ethiopia whose grasp of publishing policy seems pretty shaky.

The article, “Financing Higher Education in Ethiopia: Analysis of Cost-Sharing Policy and its Implementation,” which appeared online in August 2012, was by Sewale Abate Ayalew, of Bahir Dar University College of Business and Economics.

According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Cost-sharing paper that shared too much with other works earns retraction

Duplication forces retraction of genomics paper

biosA group of biologists has lost a paper about a genomics tool after they published the findings twice.

Here’s the notice for the now-retracted paper in BIOS: Continue reading Duplication forces retraction of genomics paper

We know why the caged dimers sing: They’re being retracted

jacsat_v135i024.inddHere’s a good example of a retraction done the right way (we think).

The Journal of the American Chemical Society has retracted — at the behest of the principal investigator  — a 2008 article by a group of researchers whose subsequent studies undermined their confidence in the validity of their initial findings.

The article was titled “Cooperative melting in caged dimers of rigid small molecule DNA-hybrids,” and it came from the lab of SonBinh Nguyen, of Northwestern University. As the paper’s abstract stated:
Continue reading We know why the caged dimers sing: They’re being retracted

Authors of retracted sex paper won Ig Nobel for MRI study of coitus — and had another retraction

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Midsagittal image of the anatomy of sexual intercourse, from BMJ http://bit.ly/v2ZkxQ

Yesterday we reported on the retraction for data misuse and plagiarism of a 21-year-old paper on sex and female cancer patients. Turns out we missed a couple of rather interesting details about the authors of the pulled article.

One tidbit, for example, is that one of them, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz,  is science royalty, having been a member of a team that won the 2000 Ig Nobel prize in medicine. Their heralded study, “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal,” published in 1999 in the BMJ: An inside-the-MRI look at the human body having sex. Continue reading Authors of retracted sex paper won Ig Nobel for MRI study of coitus — and had another retraction

Lacking “scientific and analytical rigor,” 8-year-old lymphoma paper falls to retraction

leuklympjuly13Leukemia & Lymphoma has retracted 2004 paper by a group of authors in Mexico after concluding that, well, the article never should have been accepted to begin with.

The article, “Adjuvant radiotherapy in stage IV diffuse large cell lymphoma improves outcome,” came from oncologists at the National Medical Center. Its abstract (still available on Medline) states: Continue reading Lacking “scientific and analytical rigor,” 8-year-old lymphoma paper falls to retraction

21-year-old article on the sex lives of women with cancer retracted for data misuse

journal of sex researchHere’s one for the way-back machine.

The Annual Review of Sex Research (which is a supplement to the Journal of Sex Research) has retracted a 1992 paper by a group of researchers who lifted much of their analysis from two even older articles by another scholar. At 21 years post-publication, this is one of the oldest — but not the record-oldest — retractions we’ve covered to date.

The pulled paper, “Sexuality and cancer in women,” came from Willibrord C. M. Weijmar Schultz, Harry B. M. Van de Wiel, Daniela E. E. Hahn, and Mels F. Van Driel. (Weijmar Schultz and Van de Wiel  are co-authors of this rather curious passage about the appropriateness of sexual contact between doctors and patients:

Continue reading 21-year-old article on the sex lives of women with cancer retracted for data misuse

Dispute over data forces retraction of wasp paper

italinsectlogoAn article published in the Bulletin of the Italian Society of Entomology has been retracted in the wake of a squabble over the ownership of the data.

The 2012 paper, “A contribution to the Ichneumoninae fauna of Sicily (Hymenoptera Ichneumonidae,” was written by Matthias Riedel and Salvatore Tomarchio, and deals with the so-called ichneumon wasps (or flies), a family with some 60,000 member species worldwide and one that, as this Wikipedia entry notes, caught the particular attention of Charles Darwin: Continue reading Dispute over data forces retraction of wasp paper

Why I retracted my Nature paper: A guest post from David Vaux about correcting the scientific record

Last month, Ivan met David Vaux at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity in Montreal. David mentioned a retraction he published in Nature, and we thought it would be a great guest post on what it’s like to retract one of your own papers in an attempt to clean up the literature.

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David Vaux

In September 1995 Nature asked me to review a manuscript by Bellgrau and co-workers, which subsequently appeared. I was very excited by this paper, as it showed that expression of CD95L on Sertoli cells in allogeneic mismatched testes tissue transplanted under the kidney capsule was able to induce apoptosis of invading cytotoxic T cells, thereby preventing rejection. As I wrote in a News and Views piece, the implications of these findings were enormous – grafts engineered to express CD95L would be able to prevent rejection without generalized immunosuppression.

In fact, I was so taken by these findings that we started generation of transgenic mice that expressed CD95L on their islet beta cells to see if it would allow islet cell grafts to avoid rejection and provide a cure for diabetes in mismatched recipients.

Little did we know that instead of providing an answer to transplant rejection, these experiments would teach us a great deal about editorial practices and the difficulty of correcting errors once they appear in the literature. Continue reading Why I retracted my Nature paper: A guest post from David Vaux about correcting the scientific record