A study on the cellular interactions underlying prostate cancer has been retracted after a whistleblower pointed out duplicated images in one of the paper’s figures that were “erroneously presented as unique.”
The International Journal of Cancer posted the notice in June. The authors backed the paper’s conclusions but agreed, “the most responsible course of action is to retract.”
The notice reads:
A journal has issued a rather large correction — what we call “mega-correction” — to a 2014 paper on a gastric cancer biomarker that fixes problems with several of the study’s figures.
The authors write that despite the corrections, “the results and conclusions put forth in the article remain unchanged.”
The paper, “TMEFF2 Deregulation Contributes to Gastric Carcinogenesis and Indicates Poor Survival Outcome” explored the role of TMEFF2 in gastric cancer. The researchers found that the protein acts as a tumor suppressor, and low levels can indicate the presence of cancerous cells.
Here’s the full correction notice, published by Clinical Cancer Research in August:
Continue reading Mega-correction to several images in gastric cancer study
Authors of a study on a potential biomarker for ovarian cancer have been hit with two retractions after the results were published twice.
We don’t usually see both copies of a duplicated paper retracted, but this is a somewhat unusual case. In November 2011, a group of authors submitted the paper to Gynecologic Oncology. But two months’ prior, the first author had decided to also submit the paper to the Journal of Cellular Physiology, without listing three of the other researchers, including the primary author on the paper. It was published by the Journal of Cellular Physiology first, then by Gynecologic Oncology, both in July, 2012.
Jie Chen, first author on both articles, “takes full responsibility for the dual submission” and “other co-authors should be exempted from all responsibilities,” as the retraction notice from Gynecologic Oncology explains.
Continue reading “Dual submission issues” retract both copies of ovarian cancer paper
A paper about the molecular details of lung cancer is being retracted for repeating datasets and “careless errors” in a pair of figures.
According to the note, the editor of Carcinogenesis wouldn’t have known about the problems if he hadn’t been tipped off that the paper by first author, XiaoJuan Sun — a researcher at Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital in China — shared “significant similarities” with another one of Sun’s papers that was retracted years ago. After the journal investigated the paper, it discovered that the authors had reported the same data as in the retracted paper “without significant additions or amendments,” along with some errors and inconsistencies.
Here’s the detailed note for “The EDA-containing cellular fibronectin induces epithelial mesenchymal transition in lung cancer cells through integrin α9β1-mediated activation of PI3-K /Akt and Erk1/2:”
Continue reading Duplicated data, “careless errors” expire lung cancer paper
One issue that we see pretty regularly is a paper submitted by one author without the permission of the others.
That’s what’s happened with “p53-induced Rap2B positively regulates migration in cells exposed to glucose deprivation,” published in July by Molecular Carcinogenesis. The paper looks at a protein called p53, well-known to regulate cell growth and, when mutated, cause cancer.
Here’s the pretty straightforward retraction note:
Continue reading P53 researcher submitted paper “without permission from his co-authors”
BioMed Central is investigating a recent paper about a potential biomarker for liver cancer, which shows signs it was written using another article as a template.
According to Jeffrey Beall, who exposed the similarities between the two papers on his blog Scholarly Open Access yesterday, the paper in question is “obviously bogus,” and appears to have relied on the “template plagiarism” technique of creating a new article by modifying a previous paper’s text and data.
A spokesperson for BioMed Central, which published the allegedly “junk” paper, as Beall calls it, told us they are looking into the allegations: Continue reading BMC investigating allegedly copied paper
A federal investigation into a paper on prostate cancer has now led to a retraction. In an unusual twist, it happened following a request from the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
In January, the Office of Research Integrity reported that corresponding author Dong Xiao “intentionally fabricated data” in an Oncotarget study of how a steroid inhibits the growth of prostate cancer. Xiao, a former cancer researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, claimed that he had tumor data from more mice than he did, and falsified several figures.
In July, after no sign of the retraction, a researcher at PETA followed up with the journal, Oncotarget, on behalf of the organization “and our more than 3 million members and supporters to request the immediate retraction.”
Last month, they received a reply from the publisher, which they forwarded to us:
Continue reading Prostate cancer paper flagged by ORI is retracted following PETA prompt
A group of Chinese cancer researchers has retracted a paper in Medical Oncology after they discovered that “several key experiments” were not reproducible.
The paper, “Decreased Warburg effect induced by ATP citrate lyase suppression inhibits tumor growth in pancreatic cancer,” was published in March. It found that suppressing the enzyme ATP citrate lyase could be used to treat pancreatic cancer.
However, the authors decided to pull the paper when some of the findings couldn’t be reproduced.
Continue reading Failure to reproduce key experiments retracts cancer study
A review of preclinical research of a now widely used cancer drug suggests the studies contain multiple methodology flaws and overestimate the benefits of the drug.
Specifically, the researchers found that most studies didn’t randomize treatments, didn’t blind investigators to which animals were receiving the drug, and tested tumors in only one animal model, which limits the applicability of the results. Importantly, they also found evidence that publication bias — keeping studies that found no evidence of benefit from the drug, sunitinib, out of the literature — may have caused a significant overestimation of its effects on various tumor types.
Together, these findings suggest the need for a set of standards that cancer researchers follow, the journal notes in a “digest” of the paper, published Tuesday by eLife:
Continue reading Much of preclinical research into one cancer drug is flawed, says report
PLOS One has retracted one of two cancer papers with “substantial overlap” that were reviewed simultaneously by different editors.
This one’s a bit of a mystery — neither of the papers share an author, and no authors share institutions. Once the editors discovered the overlap, they contacted the authors. One group of authors provided the requested documentation for the experiments. The other did not — so the editors retracted that article, even though it was published months before the other one.
In the meantime, the editors have asked the authors’ institutions investigate how the articles — which contain entire identical sentences, and some extremely similar figures — were put together. According to a statement from the editors: