Category: basic life sciences retractions

A first? Papers retracted for citation manipulation

In what appears to be a first, two papers have been retracted for including citations designed to help another journal improve its impact factor rankings. The articles in The Scientific World Journal cited papers in Cell Transplantation, which in turn appears to have cited to a high degree other journals with shared board members.

Here’s publisher Hindawi’s statement on the matter, which involved their publication The Scientific World Journal: Continue reading A first? Papers retracted for citation manipulation

Canada’s Memorial U says “substantial data misrepresentation” described by retraction notice was unintentional

Yesterday, we reported on a retraction in the Journal of Neuroscience for “substantial data misrepresentation.” When we posted, the authors’ institution, Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, had not been able to respond to our questions yet, because of the long Canada Day weekend. This morning, they sent us the following statement, which describes the errors that led to the retraction as unintentional: Continue reading Canada’s Memorial U says “substantial data misrepresentation” described by retraction notice was unintentional

Journal of Neuroscience retracts federally funded Canadian study with “substantial data misrepresentation”

The Journal of Neuroscience is retracting a paper by researchers at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, after a university investigation found “substantial data misrepresentation” in the work, which was funded by two major federal agencies.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Journal of Neuroscience retracts federally funded Canadian study with “substantial data misrepresentation”

ORI finds Parkinson’s-pesticides researcher guilty of faking data; two papers to be retracted

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found that a neuroscientist who studied the effects of pesticides on a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease made up data.

As The Scientist reported on Friday, the ORI found that Mona Thiruchelvam faked cell counts in two grant applications and a number of papers that claimed to show how the pesticides paraquat, maneb, and atrazine might affect parts of the brain involved in Parkinson’s. The Scientist notes: Continue reading ORI finds Parkinson’s-pesticides researcher guilty of faking data; two papers to be retracted

Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems

Back in April, a group of French and Tunisian researchers published a paper in Biomaterials which came to the astonishing conclusion that buckyballs (carbon tetrachloride) coated in olive oil could dramatically extend the lives of lab rodents. That news was picked up by Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, on which he expressed some bemusement about the work but ultimately praised it:

These are reasonable (but unproven) hypotheses, and I very much look forward to seeing this work followed up to see some more light shed on them. The whole life-extension result needs to be confirmed as well, and in other species. I congratulate the authors of this work, though, for giving me the most number of raised eyebrows I’ve had while reading a scientific paper in quite some time.

One of those eyebrows dropped a bit the following day, when Lowe reported that readers had pointed him to a clear case of image duplication in the article. At the time, Lowe concluded: Continue reading Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems

Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper

Caution: Sexual innuendo ahead.

The withdrawal method is a notoriously unreliable form of birth control. It seems that what happens between the sheets applies to paper as well as cotton.

Here’s a retraction notice from BMC Research Notes that speaks — and nudges and winks — for itself. The 2011 article, “Effect of controlled and uncontrolled cooling rate on motility parameters of cryopreserved ram spermatozoa,” by a team of Irani veterinary scientists: Continue reading Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper

Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?

Linus Pauling, via Wikimedia

We love history at Retraction Watch, but with few exceptions, such as covering what seems to have been the first-ever English language retraction in 1756, the daily march of retractions doesn’t leave us much time to take steps back. So we’re very glad to be able to present a guest post by our friend Jeff Perkel about a classic paper that scientists have known to be wrong for most of its nearly 60-year-life — and yet remains in the literature.

The date is December 31, 1952. Linus Pauling, the CalTech wunder-chemist who had recently solved the secondary structure of proteins by describing the alpha-helix and the beta-sheet, has just submitted a “Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids” to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The PNAS description appears in February 1953 and runs for 14 pages, with seven figures and two tables (compare that with Watson and Crick’s one-pager two months later in Nature).

Pauling also submitted a short note to Nature to alert that journal’s readers to the basics of the PNAS paper. The Nature note appeared in the journal’s February 21 issue: Continue reading Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?

Author whose duplications forced Cell correction retracts paper on Down syndrome

Sebastian Schuchmann, a neuroscience researcher whose duplication errors led to a Cell correction last year, has retracted a 12-year-old paper in the Journal of Neurochemistry whose figures were copied from two of his earlier papers.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Author whose duplications forced Cell correction retracts paper on Down syndrome

Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes

Researchers deleted more genes than they bargained for in a Drosophila strain, a mistake that resulted in a retraction of a paper from 2007.

Ron Wides, a biologist specializing in pattern development at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and colleagues have retracted a paper published in Mechanisms of Development after his lab found that their technique to delete the Ten-a gene ended up deleting other nearby genes, too.

It was deletions of other genes, and not Ten-a, that killed the fruit flies, Wides concluded. His group had also concluded, erroneously, that Ten-a is what’s known as a “pair-rule” gene. Fruit fly embryos develop in stacked segments, like tubes of Pringles; pair-rule genes guide the development of alternating segments. Those other loci, and not Ten-a, caused lethality and caused the flies to develop improperly early,  Wides concluded.

The retraction reads in full: Continue reading Biologists delete paper from literature after realizing they’d deleted too many genes

Korean stem cell investigation expands to another researcher, and more papers

Last month, we brought you the story of Soo-Kyung Kang, a Seoul National University stem cell researcher who has now retracted four papers amidst questions about image manipulation in a total of 14 studies. That story has drawn a great deal of attention in Korea, with comparisons to the Woo-Suk Hwang scandal, and has even led to a profile of Retraction Watch in the Seoul Daily, one of Korea’s largest newspapers.

We’ve now learned that the investigation has grown to 25 papers after an anonymous whistleblower warned about possible data fabrications in another paper by Kang, an associate professor of veterinary biotechnology, and Kyung-Sun Kang, director of the Adult Stem Cell Research Center in the same department (but no relation). And Soo-Kyung Kang was investigated in 2010, according to the Korea Herald.

The researchers’ labs are also under lockdown Continue reading Korean stem cell investigation expands to another researcher, and more papers