Category: china retractions

You’ve been dupe’d: Nice data — let’s see them again

As we’ve said before, with hundreds of retractions per year, there are simply too many for us to cover individually.

So from time to time we’ll compile a list of retractions that appeared relatively straightforward, just for record-keeping purposes.

Often, these seemingly straightforward retractions involve duplications, in which authors — accidentally or on purpose — republish their own work elsewhere.

Sometimes journals and authors blame this event on “poor communication,” our first example notes:

Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d: Nice data — let’s see them again

Author pulls study for duplication, blames editing company

MedChemCommThe author of a paper about insulin has retracted it due to “extensive text and data overlap” with another paper.

In November 2015, MedChemComm issued an expression of concern (EOC) for the same paper. According to the EOC, the author of the paper, Yong Yang, flagged the paper to the journal, citing problems with authorship and portions of text overlap, which Yang attributed to an editing company.  

The editor-in-chief of the journal told us Yang’s institution — China Medical University — carried out an investigation into the case at the journal’s request.

We’ve also found a 2015 retraction for Yang, after he published a paper without the okay of his previous institution in Texas. 

Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Author pulls study for duplication, blames editing company

You’ve been dupe’d (again): Do these data look familiar? They are

plant_growth_regulationWe can’t keep up with the growing number of retraction notices, so we’ve compiled a list of recent duplications to update our records.

1. Authors don’t always intentionally duplicate their own work, of course. The first paper on our list was retracted after the authors included a figure from a previous paper by accident, according to the publisher: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d (again): Do these data look familiar? They are

Author, among others, loses four papers for “compromised” peer review

Annals of human geneticsJournals have retracted four papers from an author after uncovering evidence the peer review process had been compromised. Three papers have all common authors. 

In one notice, issued last month, Annals of Human Genetics said it had reason to believe the paper had been reviewed by unqualified reviewers. Last year, another journal, Molecular Biology Reports, pulled two papers by the same group — all based at the China Medical University in Shenyang — all for peer-review issues. Additionally, Molecular Biology Reports also retracted another paper co-authored by Peng Liu last year, which did not include her other colleagues on the three other papers. All papers describe the epigenetic changes — modifications in expressions of genes — that may underlie cancer.

Here’s the retraction notice in the Annals of Human Genetics, published June 27: Continue reading Author, among others, loses four papers for “compromised” peer review

Engineering journal pulls two papers for “compromised” peer review

The Open Mechanical Engineering Journal

An engineering journal has retracted two papers for faked or rigged peer review, but authors of one of the papers are objecting to the retraction. 

The first author of that paper told us he and his co-authors “absolutely disagree” with the retraction, and are prepared to use “legal means” to safeguard their “rights and interests.” He added: 

…my paper was published by normal ways, I don’t know why the peer review process was compromised and what the journal found in its investigation.

Here’s the retraction notice, which is similar for both papers: Continue reading Engineering journal pulls two papers for “compromised” peer review

Dental paper pulled for “wrong content with serious consequences”

Clinical Oral InvestigationsAn article on how missing teeth affect chewing was — well, pulled — when someone noticed a few errors. The journal later published a corrected version.

The retraction for “Chewing ability in an adult Chinese population” appeared in Clinical Oral Investigations in 2012, but we’re sharing it with you now because the notice contains some remarkable language:

This article has been withdrawn due to wrong content with serious consequences such as danger to people’s health.

Last author Nico H.J. Creugers, who works at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, told us: 

Continue reading Dental paper pulled for “wrong content with serious consequences”

Fake email for corresponding author forces neuro journal to retract paper

Cellular and Molecular NeurobiologyA chair of a neurobiology department in China has requested the retraction of a paper on which he was unwittingly listed as the lead and corresponding author.

How could a corresponding author — you know, the person with whom the journal corresponds about the paper — be added without their consent? It seems that a fraudulent email account was involved in this case. The address listed for Cheng He, a researcher at the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, didn’t belong to him, said a spokesperson for Springer.

According to the retraction notice for “Identification of the Interaction Between the Human Homologue of the Arabidopsis COP9 Signalosome Subunit 7a and Olig1:”

Continue reading Fake email for corresponding author forces neuro journal to retract paper

Third party company botched student’s doctoral work, says biologist

Cellular Physiology and BiochemistryA PhD student who was supposed to complete part of an experiment passed the job on to a third party company, which in turn provided figures that were plagiarized and fabricated. That’s according to the corresponding author of the paper, which has now been retracted.

Hong Ren, affiliated with Xi’an Jiao Tong University in China, told us that he decided to delay the student’s graduation after he discovered that the student had passed off the work.

It’s not at all obvious that a third party was involved from the brief retraction notice for “EMT phenotype is induced by increased Src kinase activity via Src-mediated caspase-8 phosphorylation:”

Continue reading Third party company botched student’s doctoral work, says biologist

Misidentified cell line fells cancer paper

Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 2.52.06 PMResearchers have retracted a paper about a new molecular target for cancer after realizing they had mistaken the identity of their cell line.

It’s all too easy to mix up cell lines, so we see plenty of retractions for that reason — and, according to an expert in the area, many more cases lurk uncorrected in the literature.

The retraction notice for “Knockdown of tumor protein D52-like 2 induces cell growth inhibition and apoptosis in oral squamous cell carcinoma” in Cell Biology International explains the authors’ perspective on this case:

Continue reading Misidentified cell line fells cancer paper

Neuro journal pulls article for data theft, prompts misconduct probe

annneuro

Neuroscientists have retracted a research letter less than two months after it appeared, admitting they appeared to pass off others’ data as their own.

Two of the researchers are listed as affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the incident has led to a misconduct investigation at the institution, a UCSF spokesperson told us.

The article, “DNAJC6 variants in Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” appeared in April. It was quickly followed by this notice, dated in May: Continue reading Neuro journal pulls article for data theft, prompts misconduct probe