Category: cancer biology

Cancer researcher earns 3 more retractions following NIH misconduct investigation

A researcher formerly based at the National Cancer Institute has earned three new retractions following an investigation that found she committed misconduct.

In May of last year, Stephanie Watkins, who now works at Loyola Medicine, earned one two retraction, which mentions a review by an investigation committee at the National Institutes of Health. Two of the new notes, published in Cancer Research, mention the review as well, and cite data falsification in a figure as the reason for retraction. Watkins is the only author that did not agree to those retractions.

There may be more changes to the literature — an editor at another cancer journal told us the journal is awaiting a decision from the Office of Research Integrity before deciding what to do with a paper by Watkins, given that she does not agree with the misconduct charges.

We’ll start with a retraction note from Cancer Research:

Continue reading Cancer researcher earns 3 more retractions following NIH misconduct investigation

Seven papers flagged earlier for fake reviews now retracted by Elsevier

elsevierElsevier has now retracted the seven papers it flagged in October as being affected by fake peer reviews.

If you’re not keeping track, we are: We have logged a total of about 300 retractions for fake peer review, in which some aspect of the peer-review process becomes compromised — for instance, in the case of the newly retracted papers, authors appear to have created fake email accounts in order to pose as reviewers and give the green light to their own papers.

The same retraction note applies to five of the recently retracted papers:

Continue reading Seven papers flagged earlier for fake reviews now retracted by Elsevier

Does this scientific image look familiar? It’s from a catalog

cover (4)There’s something strange about a 2008 paper on the role of nicotine receptors in promoting lung cancer: One of the western blot analyses looks like a version of an image from a commercial catalog.

A commenter on PubPeer pointed out the similarities between an image in “Role of α7-nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in human non-small cell lung cancer proliferation,” which was published in Cell Proliferation, and one used to promote an enzyme sold by Cell Signaling Technology.

Unfortunately, if the images are indeed the same, we can’t tell for certain who copied from whom. But a representative of the company told us it generates its own images, and this one was likely created before the paper was published. The last author — for whom we’ve found three other retractions — denied that the paper copied the image.

Here’s the panel from the paper, which was published in 2008: Continue reading Does this scientific image look familiar? It’s from a catalog

Cancer researcher earns 9th retraction, for image duplication

Journal of Clinical InvestigationAlfredo Fusco, a researcher in Italy who has been under criminal investigation for scientific misconduct, has earned his ninth retraction.

Retraction number nine, by The Journal of Clinical Investigation, is for duplicating data from another publication — which has also faced questions on PubPeer about image manipulation, along with many other papers by Fusco.

The retraction note for “The RET/PTC-RAS-BRAF linear signaling cascade mediates the motile and mitogenic phenotype of thyroid cancer cells” explains that the journal is pulling the paper even though the authors claim that they can reproduce the data:

Continue reading Cancer researcher earns 9th retraction, for image duplication

Mystery conflict between authors fells molecular bio paper

mirna-journal-coverA journal has pulled a paper about tools to knock out a key transcription factor because of a conflict between the authors.

The retracted article is “Generation of Knock down Tools for Transcription Factor 7-like-2 (TCF7L2) and Evaluation of its Expression Pattern in Developing Chicken Optic Tectum,” published just last year in MicroRNA.

We’ll get right to the reason — the retraction note provides one short one:

Continue reading Mystery conflict between authors fells molecular bio paper

Fake email address — for author, not reviewer — fells another paper

Screen Shot 2016-02-22 at 10.19.43 AMWe’ve seen many cases of researchers creating fake email addresses to impersonate reviewers that usher their paper to publication.

But in the latest fake email incident, a journal is retracting a paper on liver cancer after the first author created a phony address for the last and corresponding author. Both are researchers at Zhengzhou University in China.

This isn’t the first time that an author has worked around the corresponding author: there’s a case from a few years ago in which the corresponding author didn’t know that the paper was being published at all. Recently, we also wrote about a doctor who was suspended in the UK after submitting papers without her co-authors’ knowledge, including creating a fake email for one of them.

This latest paper had another problem, too: plagiarism. Here’s the retraction note for “The influence of TLR4 agonist lipopolysaccharides on hepatocellular carcinoma cells and the feasibility of its application in treating liver cancer,” published in OncoTargets and Therapy:

Continue reading Fake email address — for author, not reviewer — fells another paper

NEJM corrects 3 papers after prominent cancer scientist left off credit for breakthrough

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 12.04.43 PMThe New England Journal of Medicine has corrected three highly cited papers to credit researchers who played a role in the work.

The papers describe a treatment in which engineered T cells fight leukemia, originally hailed as a “major advance” in the New York Times. Since the first paper appeared in 2011, co-author Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania has received more than $7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to MIT Technology Review. But according to a newly published correction, the three NEJM papers failed to note in the acknowledgement section that an important component of the experiments was supplied by researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The correction, made 11 months after a request from co-author and Penn researcher David Porter, explains the contribution of the St Jude’s researchers:

Continue reading NEJM corrects 3 papers after prominent cancer scientist left off credit for breakthrough

When misconduct strikes: A fictional tale

Raw dataPernille Rørth is not your typical novelist. She was a scientist for 25 years and was also editor-in-chief of the EMBO Journal for five years. But now, she’s written a novel – Raw Data – about an incident of misconduct that forces a top lab in Boston to retract a prominent Nature paper. The novel exposes how scientists – even the most well-intentioned – can crack under the intense pressure of such a career-killing event. (There’s even a twist at the end.) We spoke to Rørth about her novel, and what she wants it to achieve.

Retraction Watch: Misconduct is – thankfully – a relatively rare event in science. Why write a novel about it? Continue reading When misconduct strikes: A fictional tale

Author with seven retractions makes Thomson Reuters list of top scientists — plus another twist

aggarwal
Bharat Aggarwal

A cancer researcher who recently retired from MD Anderson Cancer Center —  and also recently lost seven papers from one journal following a multi-year investigation — is one of the world’s top scientists, according to a new ranking.

In Thomson Reuters Web of Science’s 2015 list of The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds, Bharat Aggarwal’s name tops the section for Pharmacology and Toxicology (see p. 89). In all fairness, the list is presented in alphabetical order, and seven of Aggarwal’s papers have each been cited at least 1,000 times. But in addition to his recent seven retractions, he has has six corrections, two unexplained withdrawals, and two Expressions of Concern.

We contacted Thomson Reuters Web of Science to inquire, and a spokesperson told us: Continue reading Author with seven retractions makes Thomson Reuters list of top scientists — plus another twist

EMBO awardee under investigation loses grant

Sonia Melo
Sonia Melo

Sonia Melo, the recipient of an early career award from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) who fell under investigation after one of her papers was retracted, has now lost the grant.

On the EMBO release announcing the nine awardees of the 2015 Installation Grants, there now appears an asterisk beside Melo’s name. At the bottom of the page, this message appears: Continue reading EMBO awardee under investigation loses grant