Ulrich Lichtenthaler, a management professor at the University of Mannheim who has had to retract 16 papers for data irregularities, has resigned his faculty position.
According to a terse release from the university (translated from German): Continue reading After 16 retractions, management professor Lichtenthaler resigns post
We’ve written before about how common cell line mix ups are in cancer research; according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal article (paywalled), between a fifth and a third of cancer cell lines tested by suspicious researchers turned out to be misidentified.
Obviously, mistakenly studying the wrong kind of cancer is a waste of precious resources, both time and money. And it’s clear the problem hasn’t gone away. PLoS ONE just retracted a cancer paper originally published in December 2012 for studying two cell lines that had been contaminated by other cell types.
Here’s the notice for “Epithelial Mesenchymal Transition Is Required for Acquisition of Anoikis Resistance and Metastatic Potential in Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma”:
Continue reading Cell line switch sinks PLoS ONE cancer paper
A third study of GcMAF, a protein being used to treat a variety of conditions from AIDS to autism to cancer, all without the blessing of health agencies, has been retracted.
Here’s the notice in Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy for “Immunotherapy of metastatic colorectal cancer with vitamin D-binding protein-derived macrophage-activating factor, GcMAF:” Continue reading Yet another study of widely touted cancer “cure” retracted
Sometimes publishers and authors decide it’s easier to retract a paper than leave it up for discussion by other scientists.
That seems to be the case here: The authors of a paper in Langmuir retracted it in September for a math mistake, but not before the journal refused to publish a comment criticizing the publication.
Here’s the notice for “Drainage of a thin liquid film between hydrophobic spheres: Boundary curvature effects:” Continue reading Is it better to retract a paper, or publish a letter calling the conclusions “unphysical?”
You know it’s a good one when it makes it onto the Wikipedia page for “scientific misconduct.”
On April 21, the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics retracted two 2008 papers by scientist Alexander Spivak of Holon Institute of Technology in Israel. In September, the journal updated the notice to explain why: The papers both contained copy/pasted chunks from a 2001 paper by Spivak’s post-doc boss at Tel Aviv University, Zeev Schuss, and two other authors.
The tipster seems to have been Schuss himself, who told us about his role in the unravelling of the fraud: Continue reading Blatant plagiarism sinks paper (and earns a sabbatical!) for mathematician
Here at Retraction Watch, we have a lot of fun exploring all the different kinds of science that cross our paths.
Some, though, we’re just not qualified to understand, like this retracted paper in the Journal of Management Studies, which according to the abstract “demonstrates that the persistence of brokerage positions decreases broker performance.”
What is clear is the retraction: the author already published the conclusion in a Japanese management journal in 2011.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Networking paper retracted for “overlap” with author’s prior publication
A little more than a month after removing a highly criticized article that claimed the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine increased the risk of autism in African American boys, Translational Neurodegeneration has officially retracted the paper.
Here’s the notice, dated yesterday: Continue reading Journal makes it official, retracting controversial autism-vaccine paper
Three physicists at Imperial College London have retracted a paper on Coulomb collisions, a kind of fender bender between two charged particles, after realizing their equations were written wrong.
The mistake resulted in an erroneous conclusion about the strength of the collisions.
Here’s the notice for “Effects of Large-Angle Coulomb Collisions on Inertial Confinement Fusion Plasmas”: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Particle physicists pull paper after equation collides with the truth
Journal publishers can be agonizingly slow when it comes to officially retracting a paper.
Here’s a prime example of the consequences of that bureaucratic foot-dragging: Ten months after being told that Fazlurrahman Khan had fabricated his data, and two months after announcing two of Khan’s papers would be retracted from two of its journals, Elsevier still has not retracted either paper.
Worse, at least one of the papers, “Degradation of 2,4-dinitroanisole (DNAN) by metabolic cooperative activity of Pseudomonas sp. strain FK357 and Rhodococcus imtechensis strain RKJ300,” in the journal Chemosphere, has been cited since the announcement was made. In fact, the paper was published in Journal of Hazardous Materials, the Elsevier journal that is dragging its feet retracting another of Khan’s papers, “Aerobic degradation of 4-nitroaniline (4-NA) via novel degradation intermediates by Rhodococcus sp. strain FK48.”
Jim Spain, in whose lab Khan worked at Georgia Tech, reached out to us to express his concerns with this timeline: Continue reading Oops: Elsevier journal publishes paper citing paper it promised to retract two months ago
A pair of researchers who have been calling for the retraction of two papers by cardiology researcher Don Poldermans say the New England Journal of Medicine is “not justified” “disappointing” in its refusal to pull the articles.
A little background: Poldermans resigned from Erasmus University in 2011 after having been accused of misconduct. Last week, we reported that the European Heart Journal had issued an expression of concern for a 2001 article on which he was first author.
The New England Journal of Medicine added editor’s notes to two of Poldermans’ articles. But as Larry Husten at Forbes reports, the journal has no intention of retracting the papers: Continue reading Critics of Poldermans’ work baffled by NEJM stance on DECREASE papers