A team of neuroscientists in Japan has lost their 2012 article in Brain Research for duplicating elements of a figure from a paper they’d published earlier that year in another journal.
The article, “Dynamic changes of mitochondrial fission proteins after transient cerebral ischemia in mice,” came from a lab at Okayama University. The last author was Koji Abe. According to the retraction notice:
Talanta, a journal serving the analytical chemistry community — we’d love to know how the name came to be — has retracted a 2013 article by a group of Indian researchers over an authorship dispute.
The paper, “Non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor based on silver/silver oxide nano-rods reinforced with multiwall carbon nanotubes,” appeared in January, with the authors listed as Leila Shahriary, Santosh K. Haram and Anjali A. Athawale.
For the second time this month, Retraction Watch has been slapped with the threat of a lawsuit, this time Ariel Fernandez, whose work in BMC Genomics became the subject of a recent expression of concern.
Today, Fernandez emailed one of us (Adam) the following message:
Math journal editors can add — but they can also subtract.
That’s what happened to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (JMAA), “On the fractional Ostrowski inequality with uncertainty.”
BMC Genomics has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper by a prominent Argentine chemist, Ariel Fernandez, whose work covers several disciplines — “His research spans representation theory in algebra, physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, and more recently, molecular evolution and drug discovery” — and institutions. And therein lies the tale.
Fernandez appeared as the first author of the article, titled “Subfunctionalization reduces the fitness cost of gene duplication in humans by buffering dosage imbalances,” along with a pair of researchers from Taiwan. Fernandez’s affiliations were listed as being with the Instituto Argentino de Matemática “Alberto P. Calderón”, CONICET (National Research Council of Argentina), in Buenos Aires, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the Morgridge Institute for Research, in Madison, Wisc.
The Economist (among other outlets) this week is reporting about a similar nother database glitch — not, we’ll admit, a retraction — involving a landmark 2010 paper by a pair of highly influential economists. The controversial article, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” by Harvard scholars Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, argued that countries that took on debt in excess of 90% of their gross domestic product suffered sharp drops in economic growth. That evidence became grist for the austerity mill, including Paul Ryan.
Scientific experiments are like recipes: With the right components and the proper steps, the end result can be a thing of beauty. But if you start with a cup of salt instead of a cup of flour, well, even the neighbor’s schnauzer won’t touch that batch of sugar cookies.
That’s a little like the situation we have in “Controls on topographic dependence and temporal instability in catchment-scale soil moisture patterns,” a paper published in February in Water Resources Research by Michael Coleman and Jeffrey Niemann of Colorado State University.