PLoS ONE has issued an expression of concern over a 2010 paper by Chinese scientists about how the immune system responds to the vaccine against the swine flu.
The article, “Protection Induced on Day 10 Following Administration of the 2009 A/H1N1 Pandemic Influenza Vaccine,” claimed to study 58 subjects given the inoculation (more on that below) and that Continue reading PLoS ONE expresses concern over flu vaccine paper
The European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery has retracted a 2007 article by Chinese researchers after the senior author decided he liked the data so nice he’d publish them twice. And he appears to have done so without the knowledge of the corresponding author.
Here’s the notice for the paper, titled “Open-heart surgery in patients with liver cirrhosis”: Continue reading Tell-tale hearts: Cardiology journals retract redundant articles
Shikeagi Kato, an endocrinologist formerly of the University of Tokyo who resigned on March 31 amidst an investigation into his work, has retracted another paper, this one in Nature.
Here’s the notice for “DNA demethylation for hormone-induced transcriptional derepression,” which was the subject of a correction last October: Continue reading Shikeagi Kato, who resigned post in March, retracts Nature paper
Circulation has retracted four articles by a pediatric cardiologist in Japan who failed to obtain ethics approval for the studies in question but evidently lied about it to the journal.
The researcher, Hideaki Senzaki, of Saitama Medical University, is a highly-published investigator who trained for a time with at Johns Hopkins.
According to the Circulation notice: Continue reading Circulation retracts four papers by author who misled on IRB approval
Last week, we reported that Craig Hill, a prominent chemist at Emory University, and his colleagues at six other institutions are retracting three papers they published in the mid-2000s, two in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and one in Science.
We have now spoken with Hill, who walked us through the history of the research. According to Hill, the international team of researchers, after “unusually extensive experiments” felt they had enough evidence to publish their original articles
but all authors (and others) remained skeptical given the unprecedented nature of these compounds.
Hill’s lab continued to conduct experiments and probe the original data after the publications, he said. (Hill wrote a piece for Nature in 2008 explaining the significance of the research, which, among other things, might lead to better ways of harnessing solar energy.) Continue reading Chemist Craig Hill, author of JACS and Science papers, explains the retractions
Researchers deleted more genes than they bargained for in a Drosophila strain, a mistake that resulted in a retraction of a paper from 2007.
Ron Wides, a biologist specializing in pattern development at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and colleagues have retracted a paper published in Mechanisms of Development after his lab found that their technique to delete the Ten-a gene ended up deleting other nearby genes, too.
It was deletions of other genes, and not Ten-a, that killed the fruit flies, Wides concluded. His group had also concluded, erroneously, that Ten-a is what’s known as a “pair-rule” gene. Fruit fly embryos develop in stacked segments, like tubes of Pringles; pair-rule genes guide the development of alternating segments. Those other loci, and not Ten-a, caused lethality and caused the flies to develop improperly early, Wides concluded.
The retraction reads in full: Continue reading Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes
The authors of a study of Australasian temperatures over the past millennium have put the print publication of an online-first study on hold after errors were identified in the records they used.
Here’s how RealClimate.org summarized the findings of the original paper, which was published in mid-May:
The conclusion reached is that summer temperatures in the post-1950 period were warmer than anything else in the last 1000 years at high confidence, and in the last ~400 years at very high confidence.
The page at the American Metereological Society site where the paper used to be now reads: Continue reading Paper claiming hottest 60-year-span in 1,000 years put on hold after being published online
The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and Science are retracting three papers by Craig Hill and colleagues which, we’re told, have been the focus of intense scrutiny within the field since they first appeared in the mid-2000. Hill is an internationally renowned expert in catalysis who has won a slew of awards for his work.
JACS has acted first, issuing two notices recently about the papers it published. The first notice, for 2005’s “A Palladium-Oxo Complex. Stabilization of This Proposed Catalytic Intermediate by an Encapsulating Polytungstate Ligand,” states: Continue reading JACS, Science retracting three papers from leading Emory chemist Craig Hill
Last month, we brought you the story of Soo-Kyung Kang, a Seoul National University stem cell researcher who has now retracted four papers amidst questions about image manipulation in a total of 14 studies. That story has drawn a great deal of attention in Korea, with comparisons to the Woo-Suk Hwang scandal, and has even led to a profile of Retraction Watch in the Seoul Daily, one of Korea’s largest newspapers.
We’ve now learned that the investigation has grown to 25 papers after an anonymous whistleblower warned about possible data fabrications in another paper by Kang, an associate professor of veterinary biotechnology, and Kyung-Sun Kang, director of the Adult Stem Cell Research Center in the same department (but no relation). And Soo-Kyung Kang was investigated in 2010, according to the Korea Herald.
The researchers’ labs are also under lockdown Continue reading Korean stem cell investigation expands to another researcher, and more papers
The FASEB Journal — FASEB stands for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology — is retracting a 15-year-old paper without the consent of all of the authors, despite what seem like valiant attempts to figure out exactly what went wrong.
Here’s the notice for the University of Bern-University of Urbino paper:
Continue reading FASEB J retracts 15-year-old study after author comes forward, but universities decline to investigate