Yesterday, Science published two papers which undercut an earlier paper in the journal claiming to show evidence for an arsenic-based strain of bacteria. Guest poster David Sanders, a structural biologist at Purdue University who was involved in a Retraction Watch story in May, argues that the journal could have avoided publishing the rebuttals—a swift retraction of the original was (and still is) the better move.
Allow me to apologize from the start. This narrative is not a typical Retraction Watch post, because it contains a number of personal elements. However, it would be hard to separate my perspective from my experience.
In what appears to be a first, two papers have been retracted for including citations designed to help another journal improve its impact factor rankings.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note to authors: If a journal asks you to suggest reviewers for your submitted manuscript, don’t thank them by faking the reviewer’s emails.
