The authors of a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) have retracted it, but don’t ask us why.
This being the JBC, the retraction notice for “Human T-cell Leukemia Virus Type I Tax Down-regulates the Expression of Phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-Trisphosphate Inositol Phosphatases via the NF-κB Pathway” is the very definition of opaque: Continue reading Mysterious retraction in the Journal of Biological Chemistry for Takashi Tsuji’s group
On reflection, that headline pretty much says it all. But for those readers who took the time to click on the link, here’s the rest of it.
The journal Heart, a title of the BMJ group, has retracted a paper that it published twice: Continue reading Heart study pulled after production glitch leads to duplicate publication
Is retracting a paper like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted?
Sadly, that’s a more apt metaphor than we’d like for a retraction in Equine Veterinary Journal of a short paper about efforts to save Przewalski’s horses, an endangered species closely related to domestic horses. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Neigh: Journal retracts brief endangered horse paper for mysterious reasons
We hope it doesn’t bug Retraction Watch readers that we’ve been writing about entomology more than usual this week. That’s because a reliable tipster has been sending us material that checks out. Here’s another case, of a retraction that appeared some months ago in Entomological News. The retraction notice itself revealed little, but we did learn why the journal hasn’t published an issue in more than a year.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Bugging out: An opaque retraction notice reveals why an entomology journal only looks dark
The latest issue of Dose-Response, the official journal of the International Dose-Response Society, has one of the uninformative retraction notices we’ve come to hate for their inscrutability: Continue reading Hormesis? Information scant in unhelpful retraction notice (Psst: It was plagiarism)
We’ve obviously gotten plenty of mileage out of our conversation last January with L. Henry Edmunds, the grumpypants editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery who told us that the reason behind an opaque retraction notice in his journal was “none of [our] damn business.”
Still makes us chuckle.
That episode came to mind recently when we learned of a new retraction, this one in the journal Perfusion, involving the same lead researcher, anesthesiologist Felipe Urdaneta, whose work Edmunds had pulled. Continue reading Florida group loses second hypertension paper, but retraction notice stays mum on why
Four neurology journals have retracted articles by a Japanese researcher who admitted to having made “mistakes” in his handling of data. Although the cases are related, the way the journals have handled the notices is startlingly different. One chose to say nothing, one chose to say little, while two went for full — or at least, approximately that — disclosure.
Guess which ones we like the most? Continue reading The ‘Goldilocks’ retraction? Revealing differences in how several neurology journals handled related problems
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
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
The other day we wrote about a case of plagiarism in an education journal serving the Whole Schooling community. One of the questions we always ask editors and writers victimized by plagiarists is how they learned about the theft. The answer typically involves some version of “we were reading a new paper and saw some of our own words/figures/tables on the page.”
But in this instance, the story’s somewhat more interesting. We’ll let co-author Ana-Lisa Gonzalez tell it: Continue reading That sounds familiar! Education paper plagiarism caught — inadvertently — by author