A group of University of California, Davis kidney researchers have retracted a paper after being unable to verify key parts of it.
Here’s the detailed retraction notice for “Proteinuria decreases tissue lipoprotein receptor levels resulting in altered lipoprotein structure and increasing lipid levels,” published by Limin Wang, George Kaysen, and colleagues in Kidney International last July: Continue reading Kidney International paper retracted after lab records “were improperly filed”
A group of Brazilian dental researchers has lost two 2012 papers for duplication — twice the typical body count for such situations.
The two articles appeared in the Journal of Orthodontics and the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery about four months apart.
The first, from the JOMS, “Selective Use of Hand and Forearm Muscles During Bone Screw Insertion: A Natural Torque Meter,” was published online Aug. 30 — just about the time the Journal of Orthodontics was accepting the duplicate submission.
As the JOMS retraction notice states: Continue reading Like pulling teeth? Dental implant papers retracted for duplication
Two years ago, the FASEB Journal retracted a paper that it had initially agreed to correct, after a dean at one of the author’s institutions said that a “well-recognized and top-class fact finding commission concluded that the publication contains gross flaws.” The retraction of the 2003 paper, as we noted at the time, punctuated a complicated case involving several investigations as well as legal maneuvering.
Now, the journal has retracted the retraction. Here’s the beginning of the notice: Continue reading Bitter legal fight leads to a retracted retraction
The Journal of Mathematical Physics has retracted a paper by a prolific mathematician in Turkey who doesn’t agree that he plagiarized.
Here’s the notice, for “Homotopy perturbation method to obtain exact special solutions with solitary patterns for Boussinesq-like B(m,n) equations with fully nonlinear dispersion:” Continue reading Journal retracts paper for plagiarism, but mathematician author doesn’t agree
The second of two corrections by McGill researcher Maya Saleh for what a university committee called “intentionally contrived and falsified” figures has run in Nature.
We reported in January that the McGill committee concluded that
two figures in [a] Nature paper had been “intentionally contrived and falsified.” One of those figures was duplicated in a PNAS paper, which also contained an image that had incorrectly labeled some proteins.
The committee recommended corrections for both of the papers. The PNAS correction ran in February. Now, the Nature Corrigendum has appeared: Continue reading Nature corrects figures McGill committee found had been “intentionally contrived and falsified”
Coming back up?
Digestive Diseases and Sciences has retracted two papers for duplication.
The first paper, “Membrane-Bound Mucins and Mucin Terminal Glycans Expression in Idiopathic or Helicobacter pylori, NSAID Associated Peptic Ulcers,” was published in October 2012 by a group from Israel and the United States. It found that:
Cytoplasmic MUC17 staining was significantly decreased in the cases with idiopathic ulcer. The opposite was demonstrated for MUC1. This observation might be important, since different mucins with altered sialylation patterns likely differ in their protection efficiency against acid and pepsin.
But, as the retraction notice suggests, that much had been found before: Continue reading A double-bill from Digestive Diseases and Sciences, both for regurgitation — aka duplication
Regrets were had, mistakes were made, but gosh-darn-it, they’re gonna resubmit that retracted paper in the future.
Such is the message from a retraction of “Tsg101 Interacts with Herpes Simplex Virus 1 VP1/2 and Is a Substrate of VP1/2 Ubiquitin-Specific Protease Domain Activity,” from Italian virologists who admitted to copying and pasting their way into the Journal of Virology: Continue reading Authors hit for image manipulation cycle, but don’t worry, they’ll resubmit retracted paper
The authors of a paper on quorum sensing — in simple terms, how bacteria “talk” to one another — have retracted it after another group’s findings led them to discover that the mixture they used weren’t what they thought.
The refreshingly detailed retraction notice in PLOS ONE explains: Continue reading Quorum sensing paper retracted when new study suggests compounds weren’t what they seemed
A paper by a crystallographer fired from his university for misconduct has been partially retracted.
Last year, we covered the case of Robert Schwarzenbacher, formerly of Salzburg University. Schwarzenbacher had provided the crystallographic data for a paper in the Journal of Immunology, but those results raised questions with another crystallographer and prompted an investigation by the university. Schwarzenbacher admitted he’d committed misconduct, although he recanted at one point, and was eventually fired.
Now, the authors have retracted the crystallographic data from the Journal of Immunology paper. Here’s the partial retraction, which is listed as a correction:
Continue reading A partial retraction appears for former Salzburg crystallographer who admitted misconduct
The journal Cell Cycle is expressing a “note” of concern about a 2012 paper by a former researcher at the University of Minnesota, who has claimed that her mentor at the institution was violating her copyright. It turns out the journal had briefly retracted the paper, but reversed itself with the expression of concern — a curious about-face that, in our experience, often indicates the work of lawyers.
That seems to be the case here, too.
The article, “Chalcone-based small-molecule inhibitors attenuate malignant phenotype via targeting deubiquitinating enzymes,” was already the subject of an erratum, available here:
Continue reading Amid a legal dispute, journal downgrades a retraction to an expression of concern