An article published earlier this year has been retracted from the Journal of Heat Transfer. But the retraction notice gives no information about what was amiss.
The article is entitled “Neural Network Methodology for Modeling Heat Transfer in Wake Flow,” and the retraction notice, in full, reads: Continue reading Fluid mechanics article retracted with no explanation
Archives of Trauma Research has retracted a 2014 paper on bullying by a group in Iran who appear to have been double-fisted in their approach to publishing.
The article, “Epidemiological Pattern of Bullying Among School Children in Mazandaran Province, Iran,” was written by researchers from Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, in Tehran. Its conclusions:
Different forms of bullying have a distinct nature and the epidemiological pattern indicates that bullying exists in the Iranian schools. Thus, the effective bullying prevention and appropriate intervention programs are recommended.
Here’s the notice:
Continue reading Bully for you! Duplication earns demerit for school cruelty paper
Authors of a study on cardiac repair after heart attack are retracting it from Basic Research in Cardiology because they used “the same samples… to represent two distinct groups on two occasions.”
We find the language of the retraction somewhat confusing, but to the best of our understanding it means that they compared apples to the exact same apples.
The study, published online in 2012, examined the mechanism behind the beneficial effects of a procedure called postconditioning in treating heart attacks. Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Heart repair study retraction marks second for Mercer University researcher
Authors of a 2012 article in Infection and Immunity investigating a malaria vaccine strategy are retracting it because it “contains several images that do not accurately reflect the experimental data.”
The paper, “Fine Specificity of Plasmodium vivax Duffy Binding Protein Binding Engagement of the Duffy Antigen on Human Erythrocytes,” has been cited 9 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
The retraction notice places the blame for the image shenanigans squarely on the first author, Asim Siddiqui, who is currently listed on LinkedIn as a faculty member at the College of Applied Medicine at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading “The first author assumes all responsibility:” Malaria vaccine article retracted for image manipulation
Evolutionary and conservation biologists in Spain are retracting two articles – one from the Journal of Avian Biology and the other from Ardeola – because they discovered a fatal flaw in their analysis.
The Journal of Avian Biology article, “Are European birds leaving traditional wintering grounds in the Mediterranean?” aimed to determine whether the abundance of passerines had decreased in recent decades, but failed to control for birds that may have gotten killed by hunters. Although it was published in January, we can only find an abstract from its acceptance by the journal in November 2014.
The authors detail the saga of their error in the retraction notice: Continue reading The “worst moment of my scientific career:” Two bird migration articles brought down by analytical error
A highly cited study examining the risks of heart disease in post-menopausal women with symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has been retracted by its authors because they could not replicate the results.
Here’s the retraction notice for the paper, which appeared in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism: Continue reading Highly cited paper on women and heart disease retracted for failure to replicate
ChemPhysChem is retracting a pair of articles by a group of researchers in China and their colleagues who pieced together the work from two previously published articles.
The papers appeared in 2012 and 2015, and were flagged by a reader whose own work had been improperly cited, according to the editor of the journal.
The 2012 article was titled “Adsorption Features of Flavonoids on Macroporous Adsorption Resins Functionalized with Ionic Liquids,” and has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The senior author was Duolong Di, of the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics in Qingdao. According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Improper citation, PubPeer comment snowballs into double retraction in phys chem journal
A Canadian research team has retracted a meeting abstract “published in error” from a supplement by Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology, as it had previously been published in another journal.
The December 2014 abstract, “A post-hoc qualitative analysis of real time heads-up pollen counting versus traditional microscopy counting in the environmental exposure unit (EEU),” describes a custom digital imaging method for counting pollen in real-time. The abstract was published ten months earlier, in February 2014, under the same title in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Here is the full retraction note:
The editor-in-chief of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has issued an Expression of Concern about a 2011 paper that explores the link between ethical leadership and employee performance.
The paper, “Linking ethical leadership to employee performance: The roles of leader–member exchange, self-efficacy, and organizational identification,” is one of seven that were flagged in a report by Arizona State University (ASU) that investigated the corresponding author, Frederick Walumbwa, for possible research misconduct, as we noted in November.
“The fit statistics reported in the article contain many errors,” the notice says. It goes on to say that “it is difficult to understand the implications of these errors unless the raw data is made available” — but that the authors were not able to provide it. Here’s the full text of the expression of concern: Continue reading Retraction-plagued management researcher hit with expression of concern
Researchers at Harvard have retracted a Cell paper on biofilm disassembly after they repeated the experiment—following contradictory results from another team—and the new results “can no longer support” the original conclusions.
The 2012 paper, “A Self-Produced Trigger for Biofilm Disassembly that Targets Exopolysaccharide,” describes a factor called norspermidine, produced by the bacteria Bacillus subtilis, that appeared to break down biofilms. The researchers used it to prevent biofilm formation of B. subtilis, Escherichia coli, and Staphylococcus aureus. The paper was cited 72 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Two years after it was published, a team from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the University of Dundee in the UK contradicted the findings in another Cell publication, “Norspermidine Is Not a Self-Produced Trigger for Biofilm Disassembly.” This time, the authors concluded that norspermidine is not present in B. subtilis biofilms, and actually promotes, rather than breaks down, biofilms. They wrote: Continue reading Harvard biofilm paper in Cell breaks down after challenged findings can’t be repeated