The Journal of Experimental Medicine has retracted a 2011 article after the principal investigator’s home institution suggested that the PI might have manipulated his data. Complicating matters, the PI in this case died two weeks after the paper appeared and his notes have gone missing — making an affirmative declaration of fraud or honest error difficult.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction comes as death of PI leads to lost records
Forged authorship — in which researchers add the names of people who’ve had nothing to do with a paper, either to boost its chance of being published, pay tribute (in a misguided way), or both — has become a common theme at Retraction Watch. But we’re pretty sure we haven’t seen a case involving as many faked authors as a now-retracted paper in Europhysics Letters. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Physics retraction as rogue authors add six colleagues to a paper they didn’t write
About two years ago, Marc Duflot, a research engineer at Cenaero, heard a disturbing tale from a collaborator. The collaborator, it seemed, had been asked to review a paper submitted to a journal, and noticed that it was remarkably similar to a paper by Duflot. Duflot’s collaborator recommended that the journal reject the paper, and it did. Duflot tells Retraction Watch (we added a link to the paper in question):
Then, several months later, I discovered that the…paper had been submitted and accepted in Meccanica. If I remember correctly, I discovered it by searching the web with Google Scholar with terms related to my field of expertise.
So in January 2010, Duflot wrote to the editors of Meccanica to alert them to the plagiarism by the authors, M. Garzon and D. Sargoso of the University of Madrid. He concluded his email:
I am deeply disappointed by the fraudulent behaviour of M. Garzon and D. Sargoso. Strangely, I cannot find any mention of these two people on the web neither of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Madrid. Otherwise, I would have reported this to the head of their department.
An editorial assistant got back to him: Continue reading Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists
The latest issue of Dose-Response, the official journal of the International Dose-Response Society, has one of the uninformative retraction notices we’ve come to hate for their inscrutability: Continue reading Hormesis? Information scant in unhelpful retraction notice (Psst: It was plagiarism)
When is a retraction not a retraction? Why, when it’s a correction, of course — like the one the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases issued this month:
In the article Reassortment of Ancient Neuraminidase and Recent Hemagglutinin in Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Virus (P. Bhoumik, A.L. Hughes), errors were made in selection of the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) sequences for the initial and subsequent data sets. As a result, the authors incorrectly concluded that the NA gene of the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus is of a more ancient lineage than the HA. Other researchers (and the authors) have not been able to reproduce the findings when using HA and NA matched pairs from viruses chosen on the basis of geography and time and correctly have pointed out errors in the data set that make the original conclusions invalid.
In other words, 1) the article was based largely on an error and 2) the central point could not be reproduced, two flaws that, at least in our book, usually constitute grounds for retraction.
The paper was written by Priyasma Bhoumik and Austin Hughes. Bhoumik, now a post-doc at Harvard, at the time was a PhD student at the University of South Carolina, where Hughes is a senior faculty member. Funding for the work came to Hughes from the National Institutes of Health, according to the original article.
We spoke with Hughes, who said that in this case, correction versus retraction is a distinction without a difference: Continue reading Retraction (in all but name) of flu paper raises eyebrows
We’ve obviously gotten plenty of mileage out of our conversation last January with L. Henry Edmunds, the grumpypants editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery who told us that the reason behind an opaque retraction notice in his journal was “none of [our] damn business.”
Still makes us chuckle.
That episode came to mind recently when we learned of a new retraction, this one in the journal Perfusion, involving the same lead researcher, anesthesiologist Felipe Urdaneta, whose work Edmunds had pulled. Continue reading Florida group loses second hypertension paper, but retraction notice stays mum on why
A day after Tilburg University released its preliminary report on psychologist Diederik Stapel, Science has issued an “expression of concern” about one of his papers.
The 2011 article, titled “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination,” was written by Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg, a Tilburg colleague with an appointment at the University of Groningen.
Here’s the notice, signed by Science editor Bruce Alberts: Continue reading Science expresses “concern” about Stapel paper
Our comment threads lit up today with news that the interim report on the misconduct investigation into Diederik Stapel has arrived — and what it says ain’t pretty. Continue reading Stapel report finds faked data in at least 30 papers, possibly more
The American Journal of Physiology Endocrinology and Metabolism is retracting a 2009 article by Japanese researchers who appeared to be so fond of their data they published them thrice.
The paper, “Dual suppression of adipogenesis by cigarette smoke through activation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor and induction of endoplasmic reticulum stress,” by Masanori Kitamura and colleagues, looked at the biochemical mechanism by which cigarette smokers seem to be able to keep weight off. It has been cited eight times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
But according to the retraction notice: Continue reading A retraction as a group’s papers on smoking and weight loss are too close for comfort
The journal Cancer Prevention Research has retracted a 2009 article by a group of scientists from the University of Kentucky after the institution determined that one of the figures in the article wasn’t kosher.
The article, “Psoralidin, an Herbal Molecule, Inhibits Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase–Mediated Akt Signaling in Androgen-Independent Prostate Cancer Cells,” has been cited 9 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Earlier iterations of the research were presented at two cancer meetings in 2008.
Continue reading Cancer journal retracts herbal medicine paper, citing misconduct probe