Category: corrections

NEJM corrects 3 papers after prominent cancer scientist left off credit for breakthrough

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 12.04.43 PMThe New England Journal of Medicine has corrected three highly cited papers to credit researchers who played a role in the work.

The papers describe a treatment in which engineered T cells fight leukemia, originally hailed as a “major advance” in the New York Times. Since the first paper appeared in 2011, co-author Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania has received more than $7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to MIT Technology Review. But according to a newly published correction, the three NEJM papers failed to note in the acknowledgement section that an important component of the experiments was supplied by researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The correction, made 11 months after a request from co-author and Penn researcher David Porter, explains the contribution of the St Jude’s researchers:

Continue reading NEJM corrects 3 papers after prominent cancer scientist left off credit for breakthrough

High-profile critic slams Nature letters about dinosaur growth following corrections

cover_nature (1)Authors of a pair of letters in Nature that concluded dinosaurs reached their full size surprisingly quickly are standing by their conclusions, despite challenges from a high-profile critic.

In the letters, researchers led by first author Gregory M. Erickson, a paleobiologist at The Florida State University, concluded that massive dinos grew fast — for example, a 5.5 ton T-Rex could reach skeletal maturity in just two decades. However, when Nathan Myhrvold tried to reanalyze the data, he couldn’t replicate the results. The authors have issued corrections to address the small mistakes unearthed by Myhrvold’s analysis, but argue he couldn’t replicate their results because they hadn’t fully explained their methodology.

After Myhrvold attempted to replicate the findings of maximum size and growth rate for several papers, he found issues in many, including the two Nature letters, according to a press release on Myhrvold’s website: Continue reading High-profile critic slams Nature letters about dinosaur growth following corrections

CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric

CDCThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a correction notice to a report about formaldehyde in laminate flooring, saying a mistake had caused them to significantly underestimate the health risks.

The mistake: According to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the CDC sometimes didn’t convert feet to meters. Ouch.

In the corrected report, the agency estimates the health risks of the laminate flooring — by irritating the ear, nose and throat — to be three-fold higher than what they suggested in the original report, published February 10.

Here’s the note that now appears in the link to the original CDC report: Continue reading CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric

Want to correct the scientific literature? Good luck

David Allison
David Allison
Andrew Brown
Andrew Brown

If you notice an obvious problem with a paper in your field, it should be relatively easy to alert the journal’s readers to the issue, right? Unfortunately, for a group of nutrition researchers led by David B. Allison at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that is not their experience. Allison and his co-author Andrew Brown talked to us about a commentary they’ve published in today’s Nature, which describes the barriers they encountered to correcting the record. 

Retraction Watch: You were focusing on your field (nutrition), and after finding dozens of “substantial or invalidating errors,” you had to stop writing letters to the authors or journals, simply because you didn’t have time to keep up with it all. Do you expect the same amount of significant errors are present in papers from other fields? Continue reading Want to correct the scientific literature? Good luck

News site The Intercept says reporter created fake quotes, sources

interceptThe Intercept is apologizing to readers after an investigation revealed one of its reporters fabricated multiple quotes and even created a fake email address for a source to deceive his editors.

The online news site is retracting and correcting several articles by former staff writer Juan Thompson, who was employed there from November 2014 until last month.

In a note issued earlier today, editor Betsy Reed revealed some details of the results of the investigation to readers:

Continue reading News site The Intercept says reporter created fake quotes, sources

Science publishes Voinnet’s 19th, 20th, and 21st corrections

351-6271-coverProminent plant biologist Olivier Voinnet has issued three more corrections in this week’s issue of Science.

Collectively, the papers have earned more than 1400 citations, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

By our count, he’s now at 21 corrections and seven retractions, following months of questions about his work. He’s been the subject of an investigation that found he “breached his duty of care,” and another which found evidence of scientific misconduct.

One correction goes against the recommendation of the ETH Commission to retract the paper for “well documented intentional manipulations.” According to the correction note, the incorrect figures did not “alter the data in any material way that could be construed to benefit the results and their conclusions.” That correction is the only one of the three for which Voinnet takes full responsibility.

The other two corrections place the responsibility on  Continue reading Science publishes Voinnet’s 19th, 20th, and 21st corrections

So, pot may not be as harmless as a recent study suggested

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Researchers are correcting a widely covered study that suggested chronic use of pot might not put users at risk of problems later in life.

It turns out that initial, unexpected finding — covered by Newsweek, The Washington Post, Quartz, and (of course) The Stoner’s Cookbook (now known as HERB) — wasn’t quite right, and a reanalysis found users had a small uptick in risk for psychosis. The authors have issued a lengthy correction in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors that includes some supplemental analysis, too.

Not surprisingly, the study’s findings engendered some controversy, which prompted the authors to reanalyze their data, collected from 408 males with varying levels of marijuana use, who were followed from their teens into their 30s.

Now, an American Psychological Association press release that accompanied the initial findings in August contains an editors note explaining why those aren’t quite correct:

Continue reading So, pot may not be as harmless as a recent study suggested

Communications researcher regrets “severe shortcomings” in three publications

3A communications researcher in Switzerland has made a few errors in his efforts to communicate his research.

Peter J. Schulz, who works at the University of Lugano, has lost a paper which did not “appropriately acknowledge” another paper as its primary source. He has also corrected a paper with “severe shortcomings in the references.” Both papers were published in the journal Argumentation. 

In addition, he is facing allegations that a book chapter contains some unattributed material.

Schultz acknowledged the problems in a statement he emailed to us:

I regret very much the severe shortcomings in the three publications.

Here’s the retraction note for “Comments on ‘Strategic Manoeuvring with the Intention of the Legislator in the Justification of Judicial Decisions’”: Continue reading Communications researcher regrets “severe shortcomings” in three publications

Cancer Cell paper under investigation following anonymous queries on PubPeer

cancer cell

A Cancer Cell paper that caused a flurry of activity on the website PubPeer is under investigation, after the last author announced on the site that he’d requested a correction from the journal.

The 2012 paper sparked a lively dialogue last month on the post-publication discussion site, as commenters questioned Western blot images in which some bands appeared to be duplicates. The last author responded, noting he had alerted the journal to a “mishap,” and a correction would be forthcoming. However, some commenters remained unsatisfied, and questioned why the correction was taking so long to appear, as well as the explanation for what went wrong.

A spokesman from Cancer Cell confirmed to us the paper is under investigation:

Continue reading Cancer Cell paper under investigation following anonymous queries on PubPeer

Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper

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The corresponding author of a paper on testicular cancer is telling readers to discount a figure after she learned it may have been manipulated.

Although that one figure in the 2005 paper in the British Journal of Cancer may be problematic, the authors found data to support the other figures, and its conclusions.

This isn’t the first time first author Kerry Manton has faced questions over her data — in 2012, one of her papers was retracted following an investigation by her institution, the Queensland University of Technology. And in 2014, QUT repaid a $275,000 grant after finding Manton

failed to fulfill (her) responsibilities in relation to the responsible dissemination of research findings and that this, coupled with a failure to correct the errors, constituted research misconduct.

Here’s the corrigendum for “Hypermethylation of the 5′ CpG island of the gene encoding the serine protease Testisin promotes its loss in testicular tumorigenesis:”

Continue reading Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper