Category: by reason for retraction

Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices

We can only imagine how Joe Hollyfield felt to learn from us, of all people, that his journal, Experimental Eye Research, had retracted two manuscripts in a recent issue.

The papers, “Mechanisms of retinal ganglion cell injury and defense in glaucoma,” by Qu J, Wang D, and Grosskreutz CL, and “Mitochondria: Their role in ganglion cell death and survival in primary open angle glaucoma,” by Osborne, NN, carried the same retraction notices:

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.

Because in our experience such unhelpful wording often masks interesting details — read, author misconduct — we called Hollyfield for comment. He graciously walked us through the retractions, explaining the case in detail, until we realized that we were talking about different papers entirely. Hollyfield, it turned out, thought we were asking about the travails of Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, an eye researcher from India whom we’d previously covered and whose work recently had been retracted by Experimental Eye Research and other journals for image manipulation.

But Hollyfield was unaware of the two retractions we’d intended to talk about with him and told us he’d look into them.

Here’s what he learned: Continue reading Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices

Dutch university investigating psych researcher Stapel for data fraud

Tilburg University in the Netherlands has suspended the prominent social psychologist Diederik Stapel over concerns that he fabricated data in his published studies. According to a translation of a press release from the school, Stapel, professor of cognitive social psychology and dean of Tilburg’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, “has committed a serious breach of scientific integrity by using fictitious data in his publications.”

The release says the rector of Tilburg has set up a committee to investigate Stapel’s manuscripts and report back by October. Heading the panel is W.J.M. Levelt, former* president of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and professor emeritus at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

What the release does not specify, however, is which of Stapel’s many publications — a Medline search comes up with at least 45 bearing his name — are implicated. Continue reading Dutch university investigating psych researcher Stapel for data fraud

Anil Potti failed to disclose corporate ties in yet-to-be-retracted JAMA papers

Anil Potti, the former cancer researcher whose work has become the subject of intense scrutiny that has already led to the retraction of five papers, didn’t tell the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) about two very relevant corporate relationships he had when he published papers there, Retraction Watch has learned.

JAMA has published two papers by Potti and colleagues: 2008’s “Gene Expression Signatures, Clinicopathological Features, and Individualized Therapy in Breast Cancer,” and 2010’s “Age- and Sex-Specific Genomic Profiles in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.”

The Cancer Letter, which has been way out front in the Potti case, first reported Potti’s relationships with Eli Lilly and CancerGuide Diagnostics (formerly Oncogenomics, Inc.). As The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, reported last September, the two companies cut their ties with Potti in July 2010 after allegations of misconduct and lying about a Rhodes Scholarship came to light.

But that was after the two papers were published, and Potti had relationships with both since 2006. As The Chronicle notes, he was a director at CancerGuide Diagnostics (formerly Oncogenomics, Inc.), and Continue reading Anil Potti failed to disclose corporate ties in yet-to-be-retracted JAMA papers

Science genetics paper retracted after “unfortunate mistake”

Sometime last year, the University of Zurich’s Erik Postma was reading a paper in Science titled “Additive Genetic Breeding Values Correlate with the Load of Partially Deleterious Mutations” when he realized something.

The authors, led by Joseph Tomkins of the University of Western Australia, had made a mistake.

Postma set to writing a “Technical Comment,” the way that Science usually deals with criticism of a paper’s methods. He sent his first draft to the Tomkins group: Continue reading Science genetics paper retracted after “unfortunate mistake”

Montreal Heart Institute researcher dismissed following two retractions for image manipulation

A Montreal Heart Institute researcher who retracted two papers less than a month ago has been fired from his post.

Zhiguo Wang, who had been funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the Canadian Diabetes Association, studied the genes linked to heart rhythm abnormalities, among other subjects. Wang also has an appointment at the University of Montreal.

As first reported in Retraction Watch, Wang withdrew two papers for the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) in the journal’s August 12 issue. The story was quickly picked up by Postmedia and the CBC. At the time, Wang told us: Continue reading Montreal Heart Institute researcher dismissed following two retractions for image manipulation

Should journals apologize to victims of plagiarism? More on Journal of Clinical Microbiology case

Yesterday, we reported on a retraction in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology involving plagiarism and author issues. Well, it turns out we only had half the story.

Thanks to a comment on Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, which picked up our item yesterday, we’ve learned of a remarkable pair of letters in the journal about the paper. (We missed the letters because we didn’t originally see the “This article has been cited by other articles” section of the notice page, and the people involved, who might have made reference to it, haven’t returned our requests for comment.)  At the core of the matter is whether — as the authors of one letter strenuously argue — the publication owes its readers the same kind of apology it served up to the scientist whose work was plagiarized in the offending article. The answer they received is an equally vehement no.

We think the exchange is noteworthy enough that we’re posting it below. Before we do, though, we’ll state that journals and editors frequently apologize to their readership in retractions, so that’s not really what’s at stake here. Rather, what the debate drives at is, in a sense, whether journal reviewers have a sort of fiduciary responsibility to the scientific community.

We also need to correct the record. In our original post, we surmised that we knew who the plagiarizing author was (although we did not name that person). Turns out, as letters below indicate, our hunch was off base.

Now to the letters: Continue reading Should journals apologize to victims of plagiarism? More on Journal of Clinical Microbiology case

Authorship questions: Retracted infection paper from Spain broke all (well, most) of the rules

Have you heard the story about the young, Orthodox Jewish fellow who decides to stop keeping kosher, so he goes to the local coffee shop and orders a cheeseburger with ham and bacon and a glass of milk?

Some retraction notices put us in mind of that tale (true, by the way). Consider the following one from the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, in regard to a 2010 paper by Spanish scientists titled “Nationwide Sentinel Surveillance of Bloodstream Candida Infections in 40 Tertiary Care Hospitals in Spain”: Continue reading Authorship questions: Retracted infection paper from Spain broke all (well, most) of the rules

Author of retracted Molecular Biology and Evolution paper explains opaque notice that’ll still cost you $32

A completely unhelpful retraction notice appears in the September issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution for “Investigating the Role of Natural Selection on Coding Sequence Evolution in Salmonids Through NGS Data Mining,” a paper first published in March.

Here’s the entire notice for the paper — which has been removed completely from the journal’s site, we should mention: Continue reading Author of retracted Molecular Biology and Evolution paper explains opaque notice that’ll still cost you $32

Plant Science retracts paper for reused data, forged authorship

Moez Smiri, a graduate student in a Tunisian-French laboratory collaboration, clearly needed publications on his CV. But we wouldn’t recommend his solution to the problem.

Smiri used cut-and-paste data (his own, to be fair) to write a flurry of manuscripts that he sent around to a variety of journals, most of them deeply obscure. And, for a little gravitas, he also added the names of several co-authors — without their knowledge.

The result, from Plant Science: Continue reading Plant Science retracts paper for reused data, forged authorship

Another retraction for Jatinder Ahluwalia, in Journal of Neurochemistry

The Journal of Neurochemistry will retract a paper by Jatinder Ahluwalia, the scientist who recently left his post at the University of East London following an investigation into his work.

Ahluwalia was lead author of the 2003 paper, “Activation of capsaicin-sensitive primary sensory neurones induces anandamide production and release,” while earning his PhD at Imperial College London. It had already been the subject of a June 2010 correction. That correction blamed the paper’s problems on a typo:  Continue reading Another retraction for Jatinder Ahluwalia, in Journal of Neurochemistry