The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM) has issued an Expression of Concern about a paper published online earlier this year, after concerns about the data prompted an investigation by the University of Nebraska.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading University of Nebraska investigating work of lung researchers as journal issues Expression of Concern
The Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B: Applied Biomaterials is retracting a 2010 paper by Turkish dental researchers for “unattributed overlap.”
We’re pretty sure that’s a euphemism for plagiarism we haven’t heard before — and it raises the question, could you have acceptable, attributed overlap?
The study has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including by the retraction notice: Continue reading Dental paper pulled for “unattributed overlap”
Last December, we reported on a Journal of Immunology paper that was retracted after a Cardiff University investigation found the senior author had inappropriately manipulated images. The inquiry found that there had been “no intention to mislead and subsequent repeats of the original experiments have shown that the paper’s conclusions remain sound,” the university told us at that time.
The senior author of the paper, Rossen Donev, had since moved on to the University of Swansea, and Cardiff had notified the Medical Research Council, which funded the work. The case seemed to end there.
But other work by Donev’s former lab group, which is led by BP Morgan, the dean of Cardiff’s medical school, has been the subject of scrutiny by at least one anonymous whistleblower. That whistleblower’s allegations — which also center on image manipulation — have been reported on the relatively new site Science Fraud, which posts allegations anonymously. They involve papers published in Cancer Research, Molecular Immunology, and the American Journal of Physiology.
We’ve now learned that Cardiff has “initiated its Procedure for Dealing with Allegations of Academic Misconduct in Research” after Clare Francis, another anonymous whistleblower whose name will probably be familiar to Retraction Watch readers, forwarded the concerns to university officials. Now, according to an email from Carole A Evans, Cardiff’s Director of Governance and Compliance Division: Continue reading Cardiff University looking into allegations of misconduct by group headed by its dean of medicine
Family Practice has retracted a 2009 review article on diabetes whose author had published a similar — in spots identical — paper two years earlier in another journal. We think the notice is nine-tenths solid, but there’s a part at the end that raises an important question about how much, or little, editors should do to accommodate the embarrassments of their authors.
The notice:
As Retraction Watch readers know, we’re big fans of transparency. Today, for example, The Scientist published an opinion piece we wrote calling for a Transparency Index for journals. So perhaps it’s no surprise that we’re also big fans of open peer review, in which all of a papers’ reviews are made available to readers once a study is published.
Not that many journals have taken this step — medical journals at BioMedCentral are among those that have, and they even include the names of reviewers — but a recent peer review file from EMBO Journal, one publication that has embraced this transparent approach, is particularly illuminating.
Alan G. Hinnebusch, of the U.S. Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, submitted a paper on behalf of his co-authors on November 2, 2011, at which point it went out for peer review. The editors sent those reviews back to the author on January 2, 2012, and Hinnebusch responded with revisions on April 4. So far, the process looks much like that any scientist goes through — questions about methods, presentation, and conclusions, followed by answers from the authors.
But what caught the eye of frequent Retraction Watch commenter Dave, who brought this to our attention, was what happened starting on May 18 when the editors responded to the authors again. (That letter is labeled as page 6, but is actually page 16 of the linked document.): Continue reading Transparency in action: EMBO Journal detects manipulated images, then has them corrected before publishing
In April 2011, we praised Psychological Science for its handling of a retraction. At the time, we went as far as to call the retraction notice a “model” of transparency for other journals to follow.
Well, they evidently took that compliment seriously, according to a new retraction notice for a paper by Lawrence Sanna. Sanna left Michigan under a cloud a few months ago after another scientist found his data statistically implausible, as Ed Yong reported in Nature.
The newly retracted paper, “Construing collective concerns: Increasing cooperation by broadening construals in social dilemmas,” was published in 2009 while Sanna was still at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Here’s a sample from the abstract: Continue reading Psychological Science retracts a Sanna paper, citing lawyers, COPE…and Retraction Watch
The European Journal of Surgical Oncology has retracted a meeting abstract that evidently was never meant to be.
The study, by researchers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Good Hope Hospital, both in Birmingham, England, was to be presented at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of Breast Surgery and purported to compare rates of patient satisfaction among women who underwent two kinds of breast reconstruction, TRAM — transverse rectus abdominis myocutaneous — flap and DIEP (short for deep inferior epigastric perforators) flap.
But according to the notice: Continue reading Cancer journal pulls deeply flawed meeting abstract on breast surgery
The authors of a paper on websites that sell cholesterol-lowering statin medications without prescriptions have retracted it. The move followed the threat of a lawsuit against the journal by a company included in the study that says it never dispenses sans a script.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Statins without prescription website paper retracted after company says it requires scripts, threatens suit
Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy has retracted a 2011 paper for plagiarism by two authors, one of whom, V. Craig Jordan, is a leading researcher on the class of drugs known as selective estrogen receptor modulators, or SERMs, and is credited with discovering the anti-tumor properties of the breast cancer drug tamoxifen.
Jordan, who is scientific director at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, appears to have been unaware of the offense when the paper was published. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Plagiarism topples paper co-authored by top tamoxifen scientist
Yesterday, we brought you news of a story in Belgium involving questions about whether a woman who gave birth following an ovarian transplant could have become pregnant without the transplant. The case, which led to a university investigation but no retraction, included allegations of theft and arson.
This morning, we were made aware of a request for a retraction from The Lancet related to other work by Jacques Donnez, the obstetrician-gynecologist at the center of the case. In 2004, Donnez and colleagues published what they said was the first pregnancy using frozen banked ovarian tissue in The Lancet. The paper has been cited hundreds of times, but not everyone agreed with Donnez et al’s assessment at the time. All but one of the authors of a Lancet letter — colleagues of Donnez’s at the Catholic University of Louvain — describing the perinatal follow-up of the woman now say they don’t either, and want to retract their letter.
In their letter requesting retraction, published in the journal on July 14, Corinne Hubinont and colleagues write that they “did not have access to the patient’s gynaecological records throughout the pregnancy,” but that “Recently, we had the opportunity to read the patient’s notes,” which include a progesterone measurement “omitted by Donnez and colleagues:” Continue reading Ovarian transplant update: Authors of 2004 live-birth follow-up letter ask Lancet to retract it