Blood posts “notice of concern” over second Wagers-Mayack paper

A day after an up and coming Harvard stem cell scientist retracted a Nature paper, Blood has issued a notice of concern about another paper by the same group, published in August 2008, the Boston Globe reports. Such notices often, but not always, precede retractions.

According to the notice for “Osteolineage niche cells initiate hematopoietic stem cell mobilization”: Continue reading Blood posts “notice of concern” over second Wagers-Mayack paper

What’s going on at Haematologica? Journal double-publishes three different studies

Sometimes, studies are so nice, you want to print them twice. But when that happens three times within a year, well, maybe it’s not so nice. Consider the following three retractions, which appeared on a single page of Haematologica last month.

One:

The Haematologica Production Office erroneously double-published the article entitled “P39/Tsugane cells are a false cell line contaminated with HL-60 cells and are not suitable for mechanistic studies in myelodysplastic syndromes” by David P. Steensma. Haematologica. 2010 Feb 23. [Epub ahead of print] with doi:10.3324/haematol.2009.022988 . This article must therefore be considered as retracted, as the correct version of the same article has been correctly published on July 1, 2010, as doi:10.3324/haematol.2010.022988. Haematologica sincerely apologizes to the authors and the readers for this mistake.

Two: Continue reading What’s going on at Haematologica? Journal double-publishes three different studies

Do plagiarism, fraud, and retractions make it more difficult to trust research from China?

Yesterday, we blogged about the retraction of a paper in the Journal of Clinical Rheumatology from a research team in China. The paper — claiming that tai chi helped women with arthritis — was riddled with inconsistencies and plagiarism.

Today, plagiarism and fraud made the front page of the New York Times.

Coincidence? Continue reading Do plagiarism, fraud, and retractions make it more difficult to trust research from China?

Rheumatology journal retracts tai chi-arthritis paper over fraud concerns

Most retractions happen in the dark: An article appears in print. One day it is withdrawn, with only a brief paragraph or two on the page to alert us to its fate.

On rare occasions, however, the process is more transparent, and when that happens it’s like the publishing equivalent of a supernova, a chance to glimpse in (here’s where the cosmic analogy stalls) almost real-time the retraction as it unfolds.

Here’s one of those unusual events.

The Journal of Clinical Rheumatology this week has retracted a March 2010 paper by Ni and colleagues in China, in which the authors reported that elderly women with osteoarthritis of the knee gained significant improvement in physical function and pain from a six-week course of tai chi. That claim is hardly controversial—other researchers have produced similar results and published studies of tai chi’s benefits for arthritis patients date back nearly a decade on Medline.

But the appearance of the article prompted an extraordinary letter to the journal, also published this week, from Chenchen Wang, of Tufts University, who smelled a rat. (Wang recently published a study of tai chi and fibromyalgia in the New England Journal of Medicine, which was criticized by some.) Of the Ni paper she writes (we added a link): Continue reading Rheumatology journal retracts tai chi-arthritis paper over fraud concerns

Beyond retractions: A technique gets an obituary

Sometimes, apparently, a retraction isn’t enough to put research findings to bed forever. Consider this obituary recently posted online at the Journal of Pediatrics, for a method of detecting gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) in children:

We commonly recognize the contributions of distinguished members of the pediatric community and, with regret, their passing. It is appropriate, therefore, that we acknowledge the timely death of an old friend, the pH probe. Crushed to death under the weight of evidence against it, it was found abandoned in a trash can with a note that read, ‘‘Good riddance to a bad test.’’

To be fair, the pH probe has always been the standard bearer for mediocrity.

The obituary goes on: Continue reading Beyond retractions: A technique gets an obituary

Microbial reproduction: Plagiarism from Wikipedia, elsewhere leads to retraction of biotech paper

When is an advance not an advance?

Biotechnology Advances has retracted a 2008 review by researchers in India who allegedly stole chunks of their manuscript from several sources including journal articles, Wikipedia, and StateMaster.com, a statistics clearinghouse.

According to the notice, the article, titled “Microbial production of dihydroxyacetone” Continue reading Microbial reproduction: Plagiarism from Wikipedia, elsewhere leads to retraction of biotech paper

2009 Cell paper on muscular dystrophy gene link retracted

A Cell paper reporting on genetic mutations responsible for a form of muscular dystrophy was retracted earlier this month. According to the retraction:

Our paper reported the identification of mutations in the gene VMA21 in patients with X-linked myopathy with excessive autophagy (XMEA) and characterized the molecular mechanisms underlying the disease phenotype. Many of the figure panels in the paper summarize data from multiple experiments. We have now detected a number of errors in these panels. Although we stand by the validity of our conclusions, we believe that the most responsible course of action is to retract our paper. We are preparing an expanded version of our work for future submission. We deeply regret this circumstance and apologize to the community.

One of the original authors, Dr. Aubourg, could not be reached regarding this Retraction.

The study has been cited 11 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s a press release the researchers’ hospital, Sick Kid’s of Toronto, sent out when it was originally published.

Best Of Retractions Part II: Keyword search “Irony” as paper on Google infringement case plagiarized

For would-be plagiarists, now is both the best and worst of times. Thanks to Google and other search tools, never has it been easier to appropriate someone else’s thoughts or words. But the Internet taketh away, too—offering up scads of sleuthing software that promise the ability to sniff out cheats.

Which is what makes this post about a retraction in Computer Law & Security Review all the more delicious. As they say in the law, res ipsa loquitur: Continue reading Best Of Retractions Part II: Keyword search “Irony” as paper on Google infringement case plagiarized

Gene therapy researcher Savio Woo retracts two more papers

courtesy Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researcher Savio Woo, whom Retraction Watch reported last week has already retracted four papers from major journals as two postdocs have been fired from his lab, has retracted two more from Molecular Therapy: The Journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy.

The two papers, both from 2007, were Continue reading Gene therapy researcher Savio Woo retracts two more papers

Best Of Retractions, Part I: Water, water, everywhere, except in “Historical Palestine,” aka Israel

Although Retraction Watch might have been born just before yesterday, we find it instructive to look back in time for items we would have covered had we been around a bit longer. We’ll do this periodically to generate a “Best Of” collection of retractions that catch our eye both for what they might suggest about scientific publishing and for good old-fashioned  interest. Here’s the first installment:

A furtive attempt to play politics with a galley proof led to the retraction of a paper on Middle East water policy a few months ago. The article, “Optimizing irrigation water use in the West Bank, Palestine,” appeared in the February 2010 issue of Agricultural Water Management, an Elsevier journal. Written by Palestinian and Dutch researchers, the article modeled various scenarios of water and crop policies in the West Bank in an effort to determine the most efficient use of resources.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the printer. The authors decided to make a political protest of sorts in the galleys, a ham-handed gesture that led to the retraction of the paper, as the journal explained in a note: Continue reading Best Of Retractions, Part I: Water, water, everywhere, except in “Historical Palestine,” aka Israel