Category: clinical study retractions

Not for the faint of heart: Cardiologists retract syncope paper after realizing data columns weren’t aligned right

Improperly aligned columns have cost researchers at the Mayo Clinic a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The paper originally concluded that fainting spells (syncope) give patients with high blood pressure in their lung arteries poor prognoses, an observation that turned out to be incorrect.

The problem? The group merged two electronic databases, but did not align columns properly, a problem found only after first author Rachel Le revisited the dataset looking to cull more data.

The retraction notice published on May 22 (the one on ScienceDirect is free to air, while the one on the JACC site is behind a paywall): Continue reading Not for the faint of heart: Cardiologists retract syncope paper after realizing data columns weren’t aligned right

Leading cancer vaccines researcher retracts paper for figure “discrepancies” flagged by watchdog blog

Gerold Schuler, a German immunology researcher who shared the 2006 Deutscher Krebspreis — aka the German Cancer Prize — for his work that contributed to cancer vaccines has retracted a paper in International Immunology following concerns raised by a German science watchdog blog.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Leading cancer vaccines researcher retracts paper for figure “discrepancies” flagged by watchdog blog

Brit psych journal retracts Stapel paper on the paradox of failure

In 2011, Diederik Stapel, a Dutch researcher who at the time was a shining star in the world of social psychology, published an article in the British Journal of Social Psychology with the counter-intuitive claim that failure can sometimes be more emotionally gratifying than success.

We’re guessing this isn’t one of those times. As readers of this blog well know, Stapel has admitted to fabricating loads of data. The BJSP has now retracted the article.

Here’s the notice for the paper, which has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Brit psych journal retracts Stapel paper on the paradox of failure

Skin in the game: Derm journal retracts identical cancer case study submitted by two groups at the same facility

It seems the faculty at Myongji Hospital, in Goyang, Korea, have some ‘splainin to do.

Two groups of physicians from the hospital, part of Kwandong University College of Medicine, published case reports on a rare form of basal cell carcinoma. Turns out they were writing about the same patient.

According to a retraction notice in the Annals of Dermatology, a publication of the Korean Dermatological Association and the Korean Society for Investigative Dermatology: Continue reading Skin in the game: Derm journal retracts identical cancer case study submitted by two groups at the same facility

Weight loss surgeon who made up data loses job at University Hospital Leipzig

Edward Shang

Edward Shang, a weight loss surgeon who has now retracted two papers for fraudulent data, is out of his job at the University Hospital Leipzig.

According to a university release — which was apparently retracted for about an hour and which we’ve had trouble accessing at various points this morning — Shang’s employment contract with the Leipzig hospital is “terminated by mutual agreement with immediate effect.”

The release also says Continue reading Weight loss surgeon who made up data loses job at University Hospital Leipzig

Puzzling: Maybe weight loss surgery paper by author who acknowledged fraud is being retracted after all

We’ve been following the case of Edward Shang, a weight loss surgeon who has acknowledged making up most — if not all — of the patients in a now-retracted study in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases. Last week, we reported that Obesity Surgery, where Shang had published four papers, would not be retracting any of them. That’s what Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases Obesity Surgery editor Scott Shikora told us in an email exchange (more on that below).

It turns out, however, that one of Shang’s Obesity Surgery papers had already been retracted, unbeknownst to us because the original abstract was not — and is still not — linked to the retraction notice, which reads: Continue reading Puzzling: Maybe weight loss surgery paper by author who acknowledged fraud is being retracted after all

Hair today, gone tomorrow: Hair loss company retracts public statements

Sorry, but we have some shocking news to report: That hair loss stock you bought may not be quite as promising as you were led to believe.

A release from Vancouver-based Replicel, which takes “dermal sheath cup cells…from a subject’s own healthy hair follicles,” replicates them “into the millions over a three month period,” and reintroduces them ” into areas of hair loss” with “the anticipated result the development of new hair follicles”: Continue reading Hair today, gone tomorrow: Hair loss company retracts public statements

He’s my editor, he’s my author, he’s my editor: A retraction reveals a tangled web

The June 2012 issue of Current Opinion in Critical Care has a retraction that might have been a rather mundane case of plagiarism but for the remarkably intertwined relationships of the authors of the publications involved.

Here’s the notice, which doesn’t attempt to broach the conflicts of interest (we can hardly blame them, as you’ll see): Continue reading He’s my editor, he’s my author, he’s my editor: A retraction reveals a tangled web

Obesity Surgery won’t retract papers by weight loss surgeon who published fake data elsewhere

Earlier this week, we reported on the case of Edward Shang, a weight loss surgeon who was forced to retract a study after it became clear that he had enrolled only about a third as many patients as he claimed — if he enrolled any at all. In that post, the editor in chief of Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases, who retracted the paper, told us he had flagged the issue for Obesity Surgery editors, who had also published Shang’s work.

Yesterday, we heard back from the editor of Obesity Surgery, Scott Shikora, who tells us that he’s reviewed Shang’s four publications in his journal: Continue reading Obesity Surgery won’t retract papers by weight loss surgeon who published fake data elsewhere

Author retracts weight loss surgery paper after admitting most, if not all, of the subjects were made up

If you had read “Aerobic endurance training improves weight loss, body composition, and co-morbidities in patients after laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass,” a 2010 paper in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases, you might have been convinced by the title and findings that exercise was a good idea for people who’d had stomach stapling.

After all, the authors had operated on “60 consecutive morbidly obese patients” and then randomized them into “a low-exercise group (aerobic physical exercise 1 time for 1 hr/wk) or a multiple-exercise group (APE 2 times for 1 hr/wk)” so they could collect data on “age, gender, length of hospital stay, operative details, co-morbidities, postoperative complications, initial body weight and height, postoperative weight, and body composition.” When they did that, they found that “The multiple exercise group had a significantly more rapid reduction of body mass index, excess weight loss, and fat mass compared with the low-exercise group.”

Except that at best they had only operated on about a third the number of patients they said they had. Continue reading Author retracts weight loss surgery paper after admitting most, if not all, of the subjects were made up