We’ve learned about two more retractions we missed for Diederick Stapel, the Dutch social psychology researcher who has now racked up a total of 57 retractions by our count.
Both retractions were issued after a committee released a report which established fraud in dozens of papers co-authored by Stapel.
Stapel is still #4 on our leaderboard.
Continue reading Diederik Stapel retraction count updated to 57
A study on chronic liver inflammation was pulled from the journal Hepatology because of “insufficient permission by the authors’ funding institution to submit and publish the manuscript.”
The paper, which was published in July, looked into how steatosis, the abnormal retention of fat in the liver, turns into steatohepatitis, also known as fatty liver disease. Researchers found that Treg cells play a central role in controlling the disease.
Unfortunately, the journal’s managing editor didn’t provide any information about the nature of the permission problems, and the notice doesn’t give any details.
Here it is, in full:
Continue reading “Insufficient permission” from funder resects liver disease paper
A group of Chinese cancer researchers has retracted a paper in Medical Oncology after they discovered that “several key experiments” were not reproducible.
The paper, “Decreased Warburg effect induced by ATP citrate lyase suppression inhibits tumor growth in pancreatic cancer,” was published in March. It found that suppressing the enzyme ATP citrate lyase could be used to treat pancreatic cancer.
However, the authors decided to pull the paper when some of the findings couldn’t be reproduced.
Continue reading Failure to reproduce key experiments retracts cancer study
The first author of a paper that discussed sample sizes in clinical research is appealing the journal’s decision to retract it for plagiarism, arguing the article is “entirely different.”
The Journal of Human Reproductive Sciences‘s editor-in-chief told us that they first contacted the author about the allegations more than two years ago, and finally issued the notice in September, saying the paper “directly copied” from another article on randomization. “Thus owing to duplicity of text, the article is being retracted,” according to the notice.
That doesn’t jibe with first author K. P. Suresh, based at the National Institute of Veterinary Epidemiology and Disease Informatics in India. He told us that the “two articles are entirely different concept.” In subsequent emails, he added Continue reading Author appeals retraction for plagiarism in clinical research paper
A journal has retracted a duplicate version of a case report about a patient with Parkinson’s disease after mistakenly publishing the paper twice.
The Journal of Movement Disorders initially published the report — which detailed the case of an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease whose symptoms worsened during drug treatment — in 2010. But it ended up printing it again in 2011 because of “a mistake of the editorial office and the publisher.”
The notice reads:
Continue reading Journal mistakenly publishes Parkinson’s case report twice
In August, we reported on a clinical trial on hundreds of hypertensive patients that was published six times. Now, copies published in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety and Journal of the American Society of Hypertension (JASH) have been retracted, making for a total of three retractions for the group of papers.
The authors have defended the papers as being decidedly “different,” but one of the latest retraction notes points to an earlier retraction by some of the same authors (including first author Giuseppe Derosa, at the University of Pavia in Italy) for publishing two papers that “contain considerable text that is duplicative.”
Inflammation editor in chief Bruce Cronstein, who retracted one of the six duplicated papers from the clinical trial, told us in August that he and the editors of the other journals were all contacted “en masse” by an author doing a Cochrane Review on hypertension, who noticed that all six papers were “nearly identical.”
Just recently, we received a statement from the authors — sent by corresponding author Derosa — which argued that even if six papers stem from one trial, each was decidedly “different:”
We’ve found two recent retractions and an expression of concern for Joachim Boldt, former prominent anesthesiologist and currently Retraction Watch leaderboard’s 2nd place titleholder. He now has 94 retractions.
One of the retracted articles contains falsified data, along with a researcher who didn’t agree to be a co-author, according to an investigation by the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where Boldt used to work. The expression of concern is regarding some questionable data. The other new retraction is actually one of 88 papers that a group of editors agreed to retract back in 2011, after they were “unable to verify” approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the studies.
One of those 88 papers, we’ve discovered, has still has not been retracted. According to an editor at the journal, they haven’t removed it because one of Boldt’s co-authors has threatened them with legal action. Continue reading Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th
A group of researchers in Hong Kong and China have lost a pair of papers on liver transplantation after concerns were raised about the “origin of images” in the two studies.
The articles appeared in the American Journal of Transplantation in January and February of 2006, and came from the lab of S. T. Fan, of the University of Hong Kong. When the authors were asked about the images, they “were unable to satisfactorily mitigate the concerns.”
According to this bio from the journal Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition, Fan: Continue reading Image issues force retraction of liver transplant papers
We have discovered several errata for a New York City urologist, including in one paper that previously inspired one of our favorite headlines.
The latest development is pretty straightforward: Ashutosh K. Tewari has issued errata to multiple papers in two journals that note changes to some data points. But the backstory has some twists and turns, so you may need to read this one carefully.
We’ll start with the paper that might be familiar to eagle-eyed readers, on incontinence after surgery: “Effect of a Risk- Grade of Nerve-sparing Technique on Early Return of Continence After Robot-assisted Laparoscopic Radical Prostatectomy.” It was published in European Urology in 2012, and has been cited 21 times, according Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the correction note (paywalled — tsk, tsk):
Continue reading Urologist makes what he calls “clarifications” to multiple articles
The Cochrane Library has withdrawn a 2013 systematic review on zinc’s ability to fight the common cold.
Cochrane often marks reviews “withdrawn” once new evidence emerges that renders them out of date — but in this case, the review was flagged while the editors investigate issues “regarding the calculation and analysis of data.”
Here’s the notice.
Continue reading Cochrane withdraws review on zinc for colds for data concerns