The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) ran two retractions this week.
One of those papers was “Properdin homeostasis requires turnover of the alternative complement pathway,” which first appeared online in October of last year. The researchers were looking at the interaction between complement — a sort of primitive immune system — and a protein called properdin.
From the notice: Continue reading On second thought: PNAS retracts two papers after results fail replication
Blood tells Retraction Watch that they are reviewing a 1999 paper co-authored by Silvia Bulfone-Paus, who has already retracted 12 papers in other journals.
The study, “Human monocytes constitutively express membrane-bound, biologically active, and interferon-gamma-upregulated interleukin-15,” has been cited 124 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Its corresponding author is Tiziana Musso, of the University of Turin.
Joerg Zwirner, over at the Abnormal Science blog, has a three-part series deconstructing what he says are the flaws in the paper. Zwirner points out a number of data duplications. As he notes: Continue reading Another Bulfone-Paus paper under review, this one in Blood
The journal Blood has retracted an article after the authors determined that they could not longer trust in the validity of the data.
The paper has been cited 22 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. From the retraction notice:
Niessen F, Furlan-Freguia C, Fernández JA, Mosnier LO, Castellino FJ, Weiler H, Rosen H, Griffin JH, Ruf W. Endogenous EPCR/aPC-PAR1 signaling prevents inflammation-induced vascular leakage and lethality.
Blood. 2009;113(12):2859-2866.
The authors retract the 19 March 2009, paper cited above. Recently, the authors discovered that some primary data presented in this paper could not be independently reproduced. All coauthors concur with the retraction of the paper and apologize to the readers, reviewers, and editors of Blood for publishing these invalid data.
The nature of the data problem isn’t clear from that passage. But Blood editor Cynthia Dunbar told us that her journal Continue reading No confidence vote on sepsis paper data leads to Blood retraction
Retraction Watch readers are likely to be familiar with Germany’s Research Center Borstel, because it is home to Silvia Bulfone-Paus, who has recently retracted 12 papers. Now it turns out that Borstel’s managing director, Peter Zabel — who was involved in the Bulfone-Paus investigation — has stepped down because of allegations of duplication of his own work.
According to a statement from Borstel, translated from German: Continue reading Borstel hit with more potential misconduct as managing director steps down amid questions of plagiarism
We have an update to our coverage of the retractions involving papers from a group of researchers in Iran that were published in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (formerly called the Journal of Molecular Structure: THEOCHEM)
Although we have not received a response from the first author of those studies, Siavash Riahi, one author, Mohammad Reza Ganjali, of the Center of Excellence in Electrochemistry at the University of Tehran, sent us a lengthy comment recently. We post his remarks in their entirety here, unedited: Continue reading Chemist: “corresponding author should answer” questions regarding retracted papers
Petter Portin, of the University of Turku, Finland, has been forced to retract four papers because they were duplicates of work he had already published.
Two of those retractions appear in the February 2011 issue of Hereditas. Here’s one retraction notice (link added):
The following article from Hereditas: Portin, P. ‘The effect of the mus309 mutation, defective in DNA double-strand break repair, on crossing over in Drosophila melanogaster suggests a mechanism for interference’, published online in Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/) on 1 September 2009, Hereditas, volume 146, pp. 162–176, has been retracted by agreement between the author, the Editor-in-Chief, Anssi Saura, and John Wiley & Sons A/S. The retraction has been agreed due to prior publication of a similar article in Genetica.
And the other (link added): Continue reading Four genetics papers retracted for duplication
Retraction Watch readers may have been following the case of Silvia Bulfone-Paus, whose lab has been forced to retract 12 papers amid allegations of scientific misconduct. As is often true in such cases, the story doesn’t end with those retractions. We’ve just become aware of a fascinating exchange in March and April between Bulfone-Paus’s supporters and her home institution, Germany’s Research Center Borstel.
First, some background: Karin Wiebauer, a former post-doc in Bulfone-Paus’s lab, flagged the potential misconduct, in great detail, for Bulfone-Paus in a November 2009 email. (In fact, she had brought it to her attention years earlier.) But Bulfone-Paus did not tell Borstel officials about the allegations until late February 2010. Borstel’s investigation into Bulfone-Paus’s lab began in July 2010.
Once that began, a person referring to himself as “Marco Berns” began emailing officials, journalists, and others about the situation. Nature called that move a “smear campaign,” and the emails “libellous,” but in retrospect they — and Wiebauer’s analysis — appear to have been spot-on, based on the eventual report of the Borstel committee. That report — which found data manipulation by two of Bulfone-Paus’s post-docs — led the institute’s Scientific Advisory Board to ask for Bulfone-Paus’s resignation. She only tendered that a month later, after more pressure.
So, with that as a preamble: If we were to characterize the letter, which we’ve made available here, we’d call it a good example of “shoot the messenger.” It’s signed by 25 scientists, starting with Desmond Tobin of the University of Bradford in the UK and ending with Andrzej Slominski of the University of Tennessee. Continue reading Bulfone-Paus saga continues: Her supporters and home institution exchange sharp letters
Back in March, we reported that the journal Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (CTC) had retracted a pair of 2006 papers by a group of Iranian researchers. As the notices stated, the scientists had recalled their articles after detecting “serious errors” with the work post-publication.
At the time, the authors still had three other articles in good standing with CTC. No longer.
CTC has retracted the remaining three papers by the group, for the same “serious errors.” The articles appeared between 2007 and 2009, and were titled: Continue reading Three more chemistry papers fall to “serious errors” of unknown nature
A controversial study of how relationships between climate change scientists may affect the field, and that has been dogged by charges of plagiarism, will be retracted, USA Today reports.
The abstract of the 2008 paper in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, by Edward Wegman and colleagues, concluded:
We conjecture that certain styles of co-authorship lead to the possibility of group-think, reduced creativity, and the possibility of less rigorous reviewing processes.
According to USA Today: Continue reading Controversial paper critiquing climate change science set to be retracted because of plagiarism
Psychology Today has apparently yanked a blog post by London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa that wondered why black women were considered less attractive than other women.
The post, titled “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?” was posted yesterday and available here, but that page now returns a 503 error.
A number of people have archived the post, however, including a communications and media professional who blogs at Chic.Seven. Her pdf is available here.
The post uses data from Add Health, a federally funded study:
Add Health was developed in response to a mandate from the U.S. Congress to fund a study of adolescent health, and Waves I and II focus on the forces that may influence adolescents’ health and risk behaviors, including personal traits, families, friendships, romantic relationships, peer groups, schools, neighborhoods, and communities. As participants have aged into adulthood, however, the scientific goals of the study have expanded and evolved. Wave III, conducted when respondents were between 18 and 26 years old, focuses on how adolescent experiences and behaviors are related to decisions, behavior, and health outcomes in the transition to adulthood.
Excerpts of the post, which really needs the graphs Kanazawa included — available at Chic.Seven’s blog — to be remotely comprehensible: Continue reading Psychology Today apparently retracts Kanazawa piece on why black women are “rated less physically attractive”