A six year-old review on bird flu that failed to credit some content from another six year-old review of bird flu is now stamped with an Expression of Concern.
Here’s the notice, from Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses: Continue reading Flu paper duplication earns Expression of Concern
Retraction Watch readers may recall the case of Don Poldermans, a prominent Dutch cardiology researcher who left a research position in late 2011 amid an investigation into his work. In a letter in the American Journal of Medicine titled “Scientific Fraud or a Rush to Judgement?” Poldermans — three of whose papers are subject to Expressions of Concern — tries to set the record straight, something he has tried to do before.
Poldermans is responding to an editorial by Vineet Chopra and Kim Eagle, “Perioperative Mischief: The Price of Academic Misconduct,” which Chopra and Eagle based on a November 2011 press release: Continue reading Cardiologist accused of misconduct strikes back in a journal
A group of cancer researchers in Argentina has retracted a paper on the p300 protein in breast cancer that appeared in Experimental and Molecular Pathology.
The article, titled “Intracellular distribution of p300 and its differential recruitment to aggresomes in breast cancer,” was published in 2010 by Maria E. Fermento and colleagues. It has been cited 11 times since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading The “unintentionality” of being leads to nothingness for paper on protein’s role in cancer
Retraction Watch readers may recall that we have been frequent critics of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) — published by the American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB) — for their opaque retraction notices. Such notices often read simply “This article has been withdrawn by the authors.”
But we are — despite what some might say is evidence to the contrary — eternal optimists, so when the ASBMB announced they were hiring a manager of publication ethics late last year, we cheered. (Patricia Valdez, a former NIH staff scientist, has since filled that position.) And today, we have another reason to say “Hurrah!”: JBC retraction notices will now include “additional details provided by official [Office of Research Integrity] ORI or institutional reports,” the journal tells us.
Here, for example, are five retractions in the March 1, 2013, issue by former University of Kentucky scientist Eric J. Smart, whom the ORI found to have faked dozens of images: Continue reading Another win for transparency: JBC takes a step forward, adding details to some retraction notices
About a year ago, we wrote about the retraction of a paper in Oral Oncology that highlighted a big issue in oncology research: Widespread contamination of cancer cell lines by other lines, making findings difficult to interpret.
One of the common contaminants is HeLa cells. HeLa, of course, stands for Henrietta Lacks, the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. As we noted last year, Continue reading More HeLa problems: For decades, a widely used bladder cancer line hasn’t been what scientists thought
The Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders has retracted a 2012 study by a group of Iranian researchers. The reason: the authors had published the paper three years earlier, in a different journal.
Here’s the notice for the article, titled “Mobile phone text messaging and Telephone follow-up in type 2 diabetic patients for 3 months: a comparative study”: Continue reading Mobile phone-diabetes study rings twice, earns retraction
The International Journal of Neuroscience has retracted a September 2005 paper by a group from Turkey who published the same article in the same month in a different journal.
The research involved looking at concentrations of blood fats in athletes and less vigorous folk, “and to examine the risks of cardiovascular diseases.”It found that:
… medium and high level of exercises did not cause significant differences in lipid and lipoprotein levels, but the sex differences were very pronounced” with “lipid and lipoprotein profile of female subjects was found to be better than that of males”.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Double dipping on exercise/cardiac risk paper leads to retraction
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the work of Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist who has taken a tough stance about many of the problems in his field and coordinates the Reproducibility Project. So it must have seemed quite ironic for Nosek and his co-authors to learn today that one of their papers had been outrageously — and badly — plagiarized.
Here’s the abstract of the work by Nosek, Jesse Graham, and others, which hasn’t been published in a journal yet but is posted at Nosek’s website: Continue reading “What I find offensive is not that they plagiarized us, it’s that they did it so badly”
On Tuesday, we reported on the case of Adam Savine, a former graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis who was found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have committed misconduct.
Today, Blythe Bernhard, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has an illuminating Q and A with Todd Braver, whose lab Savine worked in. Savine’s former mentor offers a few interesting details about the investigation into his former student.
Braver tells the paper that he’d had doubts about the integrity of Savine’s data as the student was preparing for his dissertation defense in August 2012: Continue reading Wash U psychologist sheds light on inquiry against former psychology grad student
The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine has retracted a 2008 article on smoking cessation by a group from Sweden which they had published not many months before in a different journal.
The retracted paper was titled “Quitting smoking is perceived to have an effect on somatic health among pregnant and non-pregnant women.” The authors, from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had published a similar paper — “Perception of Smoking-Related Health Consequences among Pregnant and Non-Pregnant Women” — in the American Journal of Addictions in 2007.
How similar?