In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out. In Nature, apparently, you can stay at the plate after three swings-and-misses.
That’s what we concluded from a Corrigendum in last week’s issue, for “CD95 promotes tumour growth,” originally published in May 2010 and now corrected not once, not twice, but three times.
Here was the first Corrigendum, from March 2011: Continue reading The Nature paper that required three corrections
It was, as Nature News wrote last month, a story that “seemed too good to be true:”
Stem-cell transplant claims debunked
Transplant of induced pluripotent stem cells to treat heart failure probably never happened
Hisashi Moriguchi, a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, had claimed a result that would have put him years ahead of researchers toiling in stem cell research. But the claims were met with a great deal of doubt — to say the least — and the story began to unravel when Harvard, where Moriguchi said he’d done the work, denied it had ever taken place.
And as expected, the retractions have now started. Today, a Nature Publishing Group journal said they would be retracting two papers, “A therapeutic method for the direct reprogramming of human liver cancer cells with only chemicals” and “Successful cryopreservation of human ovarian cortex tissues using supercooling.” The notices for the Scientific Reports papers will both say the same thing: Continue reading Two Moriguchi stem cell papers being retracted
As we’ve noted before, we generally let duplication retractions make their way to the bottom of our to-do pile, since there’s often less of an interesting story behind them, duplication is hardly the worst of publishing sins, and the notices usually tell the story. (These are often referred to — imprecisely — as “self-plagiarism.”)
But that skews what’s represented here — boy, are there a lot of duplication retractions we haven’t covered! — and we might as well be more comprehensive. Plus, our eagle-eyed readers may find issues that we won’t see on a quick scan.
So with this post, we’re inaugurating a new feature here at Retraction Watch, “You’ve been dupe’d.” Every now and then, we’ll gather five of these duplication retractions at a time, and post them so they get into the mix, and into our category listing (see drop-down menu in right-hand column if you haven’t already). Here are the first five: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d: Catching up on authors who liked their work enough to use it again
A bit of intellectual property indiscretion has led to the retraction of a paper by Korean scientists. Although the details are fuzzy, several of the authors are affiliated with a Korean pharma company called SK.
The paper, “A Novel Carbamoyloxy Arylalkanoyl Arylpiperazine Compound (SKL-NP) Inhibits Hyperpolarization-Activated Cyclic Nucleotide-Gated (HCN) Channel Currents in Rat Dorsal Root Ganglion Neurons,” was published in the The Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology earlier this year.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Loose lips sink paper on company’s experimental pain drug
Nothing like a little home cooking.
Genetic Vaccines and Therapy (GVT) has retracted a paper by a group of Pakistani authors who recommended one of their colleagues as a reviewer for their manuscript.
That’s not all: According to the journal, the researchers apparently also misappropriated data from a previous study.
The article in question, “Structure based sequence analysis & epitope prediction of gp41 HIV1 envelope glycoprotein isolated in Pakistan,” was published in June 2012. The first author is Syyada Samra Jafri, who we see as being at the University of the Punjab in Lahore. According to the retraction notice: Continue reading HIV paper retracted after authors recommend a colleague as a reviewer
The journal Neuroscience has retracted a 2011 paper by an alcohol researcher from the United Arab Emirates, who apparently conducted some mouse studies without the blessing of his institution’s animal ethics officials. At least, that’s what the retraction notice would have us believe.
The paper in question, “The pre-synaptic metabotropic glutamate receptor 7 “mGluR7” is a critical modulator of ethanol sensitivity in mice,” by Amine Bahi, was published in December 2011 and cited three times (twice by the author), according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. But as the notice explains:
The Journal of Computational Chemistry is retracting a 2011 paper by a group of Chinese researchers for duplication.
The article was titled “Predicting Protein Folding Rates Using the Concept of Chou’s Pseudo Amino Acid Composition.” According to the notice: Continue reading Pseudo amino acid paper pseudo new — and now retracted
We’ve written about mega-corrections that allow scientists to retrace virtually all of their steps yet preserve their publications as supposedly legitimate. And we’ve seen plenty of corrections that allow authors to assert that their conclusions are correct when evidently important pieces of data are themselves unreliable.
Now comes a correction that seems to us to strike the right chords, given the fact that editors are to a large extent at the mercy of authors in these situations. Continue reading Correction for MD Anderson’s Bharat Aggarwal arches eyebrows for the right reasons
We’re not sure how many you need for a “slew,” but we’ve seen five retractions in Neuroscience Letters recently, most of them because researchers republished translations of papers in English, so we thought we’d round them up in a post.
We’ll start the count — appropriately, we think — with the notice for “Simple mental arithmetic is not so simple: An ERP study of the split and odd–even effects in mental arithmetic“, published in February by researchers from Nanjing Normal University in China: Continue reading Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters
Hyung-In Moon, the South Korean plant compound researcher who made up email addresses so he could do his own peer review, is now up to 35 retractions.
The four new retractions are of the papers in the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry that initially led to suspicions when all the reviews came back within 24 hours. Here’s the notice, which includes the same language as Moon’s 24 other retractions of studies published in Informa Healthcare journals: Continue reading Retraction count grows to 35 for scientist who faked emails to do his own peer review