Category: chemistry retractions

Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding

Bruce Eaton
Bruce Eaton
feldheim
Daniel Feldheim

The National Science Foundation will no longer fund a pair of chemists who “recklessly falsified data,” according to a report from the NSF’s Office of Inspector General, unless they “take specific actions to address issues” in a 2004 Science paper.

That paper is going to be retracted as soon as possible, Science told us. The co-authors that the NSF reprimanded are Bruce Eaton and Dan Feldheim, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder; they have been under scrutiny since 2008, when an investigation at North Carolina State University, their former employer, found that the Science paper contained falsified data.

The paper, “RNA-Mediated Metal-Metal Bond Formation in the Synthesis of Hexagonal Palladium Nanoparticles,” has been cited 138 times.

Science Editor in Chief  Marcia McNutt told us today that a retraction is in the works:

Continue reading Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding

Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device

graphic_amt_cover_homepageTo climate scientist Pieter Tans, a “novel” air sampling device in a recent paper looked a little too familiar. Specifically, like a device that he had invented — the AirCore, which he calls a “tape recorder” for air.

The journal editors came up with a unique solution to the disagreement that followed, which the editor in chief called “rather unclear:” The journal ran an editorial in which both Tans and the authors of the paper contend that their device is unique.

The paper in question, “A novel Whole Air Sample Profiler (WASP) for the quantification of volatile organic compounds in the boundary layer,” was published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. It has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

It now bears a note, in bold and red: “Please read the Editorial Note before accessing the paper.” 

Here’s how the editorial laid out the case:

Continue reading Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device

A bullshit excuse? My lab notebook “was blown into a manure pit”

CleanA researcher who studies how to turn dairy cattle manure into natural gas falsified and fabricated data in a journal article and failed to declare a commercial conflict of interest, a Washington State University investigation has found.

The study “Evaluation of Co-Digestion at a Commercial Dairy Anaerobic Digester” was published in 2011 in the journal CLEAN: Soil, Air, Water. First author Craig Frear was a Ph.D. student at WSU Pullman when the study was carried out and an assistant professor at the time of the investigation. The editor-in-chief of CLEAN, Prisca Henheik, told us that the retraction is a done deal even though it has not been posted online: Continue reading A bullshit excuse? My lab notebook “was blown into a manure pit”

Why retraction shouldn’t always be the end of the story

rsc-logoWhen researchers raised concerns about a 2009 Science paper regarding a new way to screen for enzymatic activity, the lead author’s institution launched an investigation. The paper was ultimately retracted in 2010, citing “errors and omissions.”

It would seem from this example that the publishing process worked, and science’s ability to self-correct cleaned up the record. But not so to researchers Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall.

Fang, of the University of Washington, Seattle, and Casadevall, of Johns Hopkins — who have made names for themselves by studying retractions — note today in an article for Chemistry World that

Continue reading Why retraction shouldn’t always be the end of the story

Authors retract chemistry letter after new data reveal problems in reaction, structure

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The authors of a letter describing the synthesis of ketonitrones have retracted it, after new data showed that they incorrectly reported the product structures and the reaction mechanism.

We’re not sure what exactly went wrong with the original data in the letter, “Transition-Metal-Catalyzed Ring Expansion of Diazocarbonylated Cyclic N-Hydroxylamines: A New Approach to Cyclic Ketonitrones,” published in Organic Letters. 

Here’s the reaction that the paper reported, from the abstract:

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 1.06.39 PM

And here’s the very short note:  Continue reading Authors retract chemistry letter after new data reveal problems in reaction, structure

In more faked peer review news…10 papers pulled by Hindawi

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 9.57.36 AMGuess what? We’ve got more cases of fraudulent peer review to report — our second post of the day on the subject, in fact. In the latest news, Hindawi Publishing Corporation has retracted 10 papers for “fraudulent review reports,” after an investigation of more than 30 papers that had been flagged this summer.

The investigation found that author Jason Jung, a computer engineer at Yeungnam University in Korea, “was involved in submitting the fraudulent review reports” for four of the retracted papers, according to the publisher’s CEO. In the case of the other six, the authors didn’t appear to be involved.

Hindawi Publishing Corporation, which publishes over 400 journals, doesn’t ask authors for potential review suggestions — making a common route to fake peer review more difficult.  In July, when Hindawi announced it was investigating the papers, it posted a statement saying that they suspected the editors had created fake reviewer accounts.

The retraction note on Jung’s papers — identical except for the title at the beginning — explains that each paper has

Continue reading In more faked peer review news…10 papers pulled by Hindawi

Chemists pull non-reproducible paper on method to make opal films

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When two chemists based in China couldn’t reproduce experiments in their paper on opal films, they retracted it.

As the retraction note explains:

In this article we report a method to fabricate 2D TiO2–WO3 composite inverse opal films via a mechanical co-assembly route with a template of polystyrene spheres. Upon repeating the experiments described, we found that this was not an effective method for forming the films; often the film was broken or did not form at all.

The note also explains why the experiment didn’t work:

Continue reading Chemists pull non-reproducible paper on method to make opal films

Intellectual property issues sink cancer paper in JACS

176 spine minimum. full size. Editor: Lingling JEM: Leslie RTP: Michael ReidThe authors of a paper on a mechanism for potential cancer therapies are retracting it after realizing they published some proprietary findings “without permission and agreement from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.”

According to the retraction note in Journal of the American Chemical Society, the authors included an X-ray crystal structure and data that were gathered at St. Jude’s and considered the hospital’s intellectual property. On the paper, the last author, Zhengding Su, listed an affiliation at St. Jude and Hubei University of Technology in China, along with Amersino Biodevelop Inc., based in Waterloo, Canada.

Here’s the note for “Efficient Reactivation of p53 in Cancer Cells by a Dual MdmX/Mdm2 Inhibitor:”  Continue reading Intellectual property issues sink cancer paper in JACS

50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?

Georg Wittig
Georg Wittig

It’s not often that an article is retracted only to be later proven correct. But that may have happened this past summer in the chemistry literature.

In July, a group of researchers recapitulated an experiment largely similar to one that Nobelist Georg Wittig had performed – and subsequently retracted — decades earlier. Their findings suggest Wittig may actually have gotten it right the first time.

On July 27, Peter Chen of ETH Zurich and colleagues published an article online in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition that describes a new method for appending a carbon atom to an unsaturated hydrocarbon to create a three-membered ring – a useful chemical transformation known as cyclopropanation. Yet, it was not the first time researchers had reported such a process. As Chen and his colleagues note in the Israel Journal of Chemistry, Georg Wittig of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (who would go on to win the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1979) and Volker Franzen reported a similar reaction in 1960 in Angewandte Chemie, a German-language publication. Continue reading 50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?

Trouble with data proves toxic for a pair of toxicology papers

logoA pair of papers about the risks of titanium dioxide nanoparticles that share many of the same authors has been retracted from a toxicology journal following an investigation at Soochow University in China.

Particle and Fibre Toxicology is retracting the papers for problems with the statistical methods and missing data, as well as for sharing figures.

Here’s the note for “Intragastric exposure to titanium dioxide nanoparticles induced nephrotoxicity in mice, assessed by physiological and gene expression modifications:”

Continue reading Trouble with data proves toxic for a pair of toxicology papers