Leukemia & Lymphoma has retracted 2004 paper by a group of authors in Mexico after concluding that, well, the article never should have been accepted to begin with.
The article, “Adjuvant radiotherapy in stage IV diffuse large cell lymphoma improves outcome,” came from oncologists at the National Medical Center. Its abstract (still available on Medline) states: Continue reading Lacking “scientific and analytical rigor,” 8-year-old lymphoma paper falls to retraction
Here’s one for the way-back machine.
The Annual Review of Sex Research (which is a supplement to the Journal of Sex Research) has retracted a 1992 paper by a group of researchers who lifted much of their analysis from two even older articles by another scholar. At 21 years post-publication, this is one of the oldest — but not the record-oldest — retractions we’ve covered to date.
The pulled paper, “Sexuality and cancer in women,” came from Willibrord C. M. Weijmar Schultz, Harry B. M. Van de Wiel, Daniela E. E. Hahn, and Mels F. Van Driel. (Weijmar Schultz and Van de Wiel are co-authors of this rather curious passage about the appropriateness of sexual contact between doctors and patients:
Continue reading 21-year-old article on the sex lives of women with cancer retracted for data misuse
Last month, Ivan met David Vaux at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity in Montreal. David mentioned a retraction he published in Nature, and we thought it would be a great guest post on what it’s like to retract one of your own papers in an attempt to clean up the literature.
In September 1995 Nature asked me to review a manuscript by Bellgrau and co-workers, which subsequently appeared. I was very excited by this paper, as it showed that expression of CD95L on Sertoli cells in allogeneic mismatched testes tissue transplanted under the kidney capsule was able to induce apoptosis of invading cytotoxic T cells, thereby preventing rejection. As I wrote in a News and Views piece, the implications of these findings were enormous – grafts engineered to express CD95L would be able to prevent rejection without generalized immunosuppression.
In fact, I was so taken by these findings that we started generation of transgenic mice that expressed CD95L on their islet beta cells to see if it would allow islet cell grafts to avoid rejection and provide a cure for diabetes in mismatched recipients.
Little did we know that instead of providing an answer to transplant rejection, these experiments would teach us a great deal about editorial practices and the difficulty of correcting errors once they appear in the literature. Continue reading Why I retracted my Nature paper: A guest post from David Vaux about correcting the scientific record
Our mothers told us that if we used the masterbatch process, we’d go blind. And what better way to gather some updates to recent posts than to include one that involves said masterbatch process?
First, a retraction John Spevacek noticed when he tried clicking on the link in a Journal of Applied Polymer Science retraction we’d covered: Continue reading A masterbatch: More polymer retractions, gerontology journal lifts paywall, Microbiology notices appear
A cancer researcher whose work was the subject of a lawsuit has retracted his fifth paper, this one from 2004.
Robert Getzenberg, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins, has had two papers on prostate cancer biomarkers retracted, and two on colon cancer. The newly retracted paper is about a potential bladder cancer biomarker.
Here’s the notice from Clinical Cancer Research: Continue reading A fifth retraction for former Pitt and Hopkins oncology researcher Getzenberg
The International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction has retracted four papers about virtual reality for reasons that aren’t quite clear.
The common author of the studies is Dong-Hee Shin of Seoul’s Sungkyunkwan University. Here’s the retraction notice, which is signed by journal editors-in-chief Gavriel Salvendy and Julie Jacko: Continue reading Four papers about gaming and virtual worlds become more virtual and less reality as they’re retracted
In what could be a significant blow to a major pharmaceutical company, Nature Medicine is reportedly set to retract a 2010 article by a group of researchers affiliated with a Chinese arm of the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline.
We’re not the first to report the news — you can read coverage of it on In the Pipeline and Pharmalot, for starters — which includes the revelation that Glaxo has fired Jingwu Zang, a co-author of the suspect paper and former senior vice president and head of research and development at the Shanghai facility: in other words, a big fish. (Big enough to have a profile in, well, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.)
Pharmalot has quoted a Glaxo spokeswoman: Continue reading Glaxo asks Nature Medicine to retract paper by fired company scientist
Do you have a spare $37 that’s just burning a hole in your pocket?
If so, today is your lucky day. You can plunk down your hard-earned cash for a chance to read a retraction notice in Clinical Gerontologist that resulted from a goof by its publisher, Taylor & Francis.
Here’s the notice for “Does Social Desirability Confound the Assessment of Self-Reported Measures of Well-Being and Metacognitive Efficiency in Young and Older Adults?” Continue reading Would you pay $37 to find out that a publisher had mistakenly printed an article twice?
Identity, which bills itself as “An International Journal of Theory and Research,” has retracted a 2013 article by an Italian researcher who stole the work from another author, then published it twice.
The paper, “Behind the mask: A typology of men cruising for same-sex act,” was ostensibly written by Stefano Ramello, an “independent researcher explores the interactions between space, erotic practices, identity, gender and sexuality.” But as the retraction notice explains, Ramello appears simply to have thrown his own name on top of an earlier paper.
Continue reading Identity theft: Psych journal retracts paper on gay sex for plagiarism
Apologies, mea culpas, regrets. Kids, let this be a warning to you: Don’t plagiarize. You will get caught, and you’ll have to come clean.
Just ask a group of Spanish researchers who published a 2011 paper in Proteome Science, then lost it this past April because they’d stolen text and a figure from previously published work — some, but not all of it, their own.
The retraction notice for “Clinical and technical phosphoproteomic research” tells the story: Continue reading A regretful retraction for plagiarism and duplication in Proteome Science