For the second time inside of a week, we come to praise scientists who did the right thing when they realized their lab equipment or reagents weren’t performing as expected.
Another paper by Milena Penkowa, who is being investigated for embezzlement as well as possible scientific misconduct, has been subject to an Expression of Concern:
They say that a poor workman blames his tools. If you’re a scientist and you discover your tools don’t do exactly what you thought they did, however, the right thing to do is let other scientists relying on your work know.
A team of neuroscientists in Japan has lost their 2012 article in Brain Research for duplicating elements of a figure from a paper they’d published earlier that year in another journal.
The article, “Dynamic changes of mitochondrial fission proteins after transient cerebral ischemia in mice,” came from a lab at Okayama University. The last author was Koji Abe. According to the retraction notice:
BMC Genomics has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper by a prominent Argentine chemist, Ariel Fernandez, whose work covers several disciplines — “His research spans representation theory in algebra, physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, and more recently, molecular evolution and drug discovery” — and institutions. And therein lies the tale.
Fernandez appeared as the first author of the article, titled “Subfunctionalization reduces the fitness cost of gene duplication in humans by buffering dosage imbalances,” along with a pair of researchers from Taiwan. Fernandez’s affiliations were listed as being with the Instituto Argentino de Matemática “Alberto P. Calderón”, CONICET (National Research Council of Argentina), in Buenos Aires, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the Morgridge Institute for Research, in Madison, Wisc.
Eric Smart, the former University of Kentucky researcher found by the Office of Research Integrity to have faked images in ten papers, has two more retractions, both in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology.