The Anatomical Record, the official organ of the American Association of Anatomists, weighs its acceptances on “the quality of the research, its originality and significance to our readership.”
So it’s not surprising that when it gets duped, it gets angry.
Consider the following retraction notice that appeared recently in the publication for an article it ran early 2010: Continue reading Correcting The Anatomical Record: Article pulled after former student lifted lab findings
Science doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Even vacuum science.
The International Journal of Modern Physics A has retracted a 2011 paper by a physicist who failed to acknowledge the contributions — instrumental, it seems — of his collaborators.
The paper, “Measurement of the Casimir Interaction Between a au Sphere and au Gratings” [au in this case being the atomic symbol for gold, not the French article], was published last summer by Ricardo Decca as part of a conference proceedings. According to the notice: Continue reading Vacuum force researcher retracts paper that failed to name collaborators
If you had read “Aerobic endurance training improves weight loss, body composition, and co-morbidities in patients after laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass,” a 2010 paper in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases, you might have been convinced by the title and findings that exercise was a good idea for people who’d had stomach stapling.
After all, the authors had operated on “60 consecutive morbidly obese patients” and then randomized them into “a low-exercise group (aerobic physical exercise 1 time for 1 hr/wk) or a multiple-exercise group (APE 2 times for 1 hr/wk)” so they could collect data on “age, gender, length of hospital stay, operative details, co-morbidities, postoperative complications, initial body weight and height, postoperative weight, and body composition.” When they did that, they found that “The multiple exercise group had a significantly more rapid reduction of body mass index, excess weight loss, and fat mass compared with the low-exercise group.”
Except that at best they had only operated on about a third the number of patients they said they had. Continue reading Author retracts weight loss surgery paper after admitting most, if not all, of the subjects were made up
Graphene has been hot for several years. Here’s what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had to say about it in 2010 when awarding two researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work:
Graphene is a form of carbon. As a material it is completely new – not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.
But one researcher may have allowed his enthusiasm for graphene to get ahead of him. He and his unwitting co-authors have now lost two papers thanks to that enthusiasm. Continue reading Pair of graphene papers retracted
A group of hematology researchers in Canada lost a publication to the merger of two medical device makers, after the acquiring company apparently decided not to pursue marketing the product in question.
An April 23 retraction notice in the International Journal of Laboratory Hematology about the article, “Enhanced flagging and improved clinical sensitivity on the new DxH 300TM Coulter® cellular analysis system,” originally published in February, tells the tale: Continue reading Assay come, assay go: Corporate takeover leads to retraction of device analysis
Duplication has, as we noted on Twitter the other day, been tripping up more and more scientists. And now self-plagiarism has snared a prominent Columbia University chemist in a paper that left many people scratching their heads to begin with.
As reported by the Chembark blog and Nature, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has pulled a paper by Ronald Breslow for alleged duplication. The page for “On Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth,” originally published on March 25, now includes this: Continue reading JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication
The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology has retracted two articles by Diederik Stapel, the Dutch researcher who has admitted falsifying his data. Stapel was suspended from his post at Tilburg University in September.
Here are the notices, which appear together: Continue reading Journal retracts two Stapel papers, on salesmen and on women who change their names when they marry
The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has an informative retraction notice about a recent paper it published that was marred by self-plagiarism. The article, “Current concepts of surveillance and its significance in head and neck cancer,” from a group of researchers at Grant Medical College, in Mumbai (which is known to this blog) and Royal Marsden Hospital in London, appeared last November. It soon was found to be awfully similar to a 2009 article by the same group of authors (sort of) in a different journal.
Here’s what the Annals had to say: Continue reading Surgery journal retracts cancer paper for duplication after “naive” response from authors
Retraction Watch readers who’ve read Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks may remember that decades ago, scientists began realizing that Lacks’s cells, now known as the HeLa cell line and used in labs around the world, were so good at proliferating that they had taken over many other cell lines researchers use to study human disease.
Such readers would have been nodding their heads at a front-page Wall Street Journal on Saturday. As Amy Dockser Marcus (no relation to Adam) reports: Continue reading The HeLa problem: What a retraction says about whether cancer researchers can trust their cell lines
On Wednesday, the American Heart Association announced something that those of us who’d been reading the medical literature carefully had known for a while: Bad gums do not cause heart disease.
Periodontitis is linked to bad heart disease, you see, as studies have shown, and periodontists have sure been using this as an excuse to tell us to floss. But there’s never been a convincing study showing that one causes the other.
In fact, it’s not even clear how you’d do that study. “Let’s see, for a control group, we should have 100 people convince themselves they’re flossing for a year, but not actually floss….oh, what else can we get funding for?”
That “news” prompted an email from Retraction Watch friend Marc Abrahams, Continue reading A retracted periodontitis-heart disease paper that didn’t make it into the new AHA review