Blood has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Swedish authors, one of whom appears to have misappropriated data from his mentor.
The article, titled “Microparticles are the basic storage units for different proteins in platelet granules,” appeared online in July 2012 and was written by Chi Zhang and Yang Yang, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
But as the retraction notice explains, there was a problem:
The journal Inorganica Chimica Acta has retracted a paper it published earlier this year over an authorship dispute involving the lead researcher and his colleagues in France.
The title of the paper — whose bulk alone gave us a headache — was “Reaction of a bidentate ligands (4,4′-dimethyl 2,2′-bipyridine) with planar-chiral chloro-bridged ruthenium: Synthesis of cis-dicarbonyl[4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-bipyridine- κO1,κO2]{2-[tricarbonyl(η6-phenylene- κC1)chromium]pyridine-κN}ruthenium hexafluorophosphate” — and it purportedly came from a lab in Beirut.
However, as the retraction notice indicates, that’s not quite so:
Continue reading Paper — with longest title ever? — retracted for lack of author approval
What happens when people who study management have to write a retraction notice? This, from Management Learning, regarding a paper by Gordon Müller-Seitz of the Free University of Berlin, suggests one possibility: Continue reading Duplication, aka self-plagiarism, meets management-speak
The authors of a paper in Nature Photonics have been forced to walk back their article after learning from another group of researchers that their conclusions likely were an, ahem, optical illusion.
The paper, “Greatly enhanced continuous-wave terahertz emission by nano-electrodes in a photoconductive photomixer,” appeared in January 2012 and came from a team led by that included Aaron Danner, an optics expert at the National University of Singapore. As the abstract of the paper explains (to physicists, anyway):
Continue reading Findings of “greatly enhanced” optics turn out to be, well, greatly enhanced
Two researchers from Singapore are retracting a paper that included errors in three figures because there’s apparently no way to fix the mistakes and have the new work reviewed.
Here’s the notice for “Host-dependent effects of the 3′ untranslated region of turnip crinkle virus RNA on accumulation in Hibiscus and Arabidopsis,” by Weimin Li and Sek-Man Wong of National University of Singapore and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory: Continue reading Paper with “missing or placed wrongly” controls retracted because there’s “no editorial mechanism to review the errors”
The carcasses are piling up.
Jesús A. Lemus now has eight retractions. Here’s the notice for the most recent: Continue reading Jesús Lemus notches his eighth retraction
Retraction Watch readers may recall that we have been frequent critics of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) — published by the American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB) — for their opaque retraction notices. Such notices often read simply “This article has been withdrawn by the authors.”
But we are — despite what some might say is evidence to the contrary — eternal optimists, so when the ASBMB announced they were hiring a manager of publication ethics late last year, we cheered. (Patricia Valdez, a former NIH staff scientist, has since filled that position.) And today, we have another reason to say “Hurrah!”: JBC retraction notices will now include “additional details provided by official [Office of Research Integrity] ORI or institutional reports,” the journal tells us.
Here, for example, are five retractions in the March 1, 2013, issue by former University of Kentucky scientist Eric J. Smart, whom the ORI found to have faked dozens of images: Continue reading Another win for transparency: JBC takes a step forward, adding details to some retraction notices
The Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders has retracted a 2012 study by a group of Iranian researchers. The reason: the authors had published the paper three years earlier, in a different journal.
Here’s the notice for the article, titled “Mobile phone text messaging and Telephone follow-up in type 2 diabetic patients for 3 months: a comparative study”: Continue reading Mobile phone-diabetes study rings twice, earns retraction
Duplication is a frequent reason for the retractions we cover. Such duplication retractions are so common that we don’t get to most of them. While many have argued that duplication pollutes the literature, and can bias meta-analyses when the same study ends up being counted more than once, others say the need to come up with new ways to say the same thing is a waste of time. (That doesn’t explain why some scientists don’t just put their old words in quotes and cite them, but we digress.)
Appropriately, the Committee on Publication Ethics is taking up the issue at their regular forum tomorrow, using new guidelines produced by BioMedCentral as a starting point. Here’s an excerpt: Continue reading How much self-plagiarism, aka duplication, is too much?
In a new retraction notice, the Journal of Controlled Release is living up to its name.
The editor-in-chief has retracted a study that plagiarized “a large number” of papers, but only three are listed in the notice. Here’s the notice for “In situ-forming hydrogels for sustained ophthalmic drug delivery,” by Basavaraj K. Nanjawade, F.V. Manvi, and A.S. Manjappa, three researchers at India’s KLES’s College of Pharmacy, JN Medical College Campus, Karnataka: Continue reading Study plagiarizes so many other papers, retraction notice can’t list them all