Category: corrections

March Madness? Harvard profs take shots at controversial studies, request retractions

harvardIn the wake of Harvard’s gritty performance in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament — they were eliminated Saturday — a pair of faculty members at the Ivy League institution are calling foul on two controversial journal articles that have already been corrected.

Walter Willett, an oft-quoted Harvard nutrition expert, is calling for the retraction of an eyebrow-raising article earlier this month challenging the relative health benefits of fats from fish and vegetables over those in meat and butter.

The article, which appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, quickly came under fire and the researchers — from the University of Cambridge — ended up making several corrections. Despite the changes, the authors have stood by their work, according to a piece this week in Science.

But that hasn’t stopped Willett from urging a retraction. Per Science:

Continue reading March Madness? Harvard profs take shots at controversial studies, request retractions

Authors of controversial STAP stem cell study author correct 2011 paper

tissue engineering aThere have been a number of developments in the unraveling of two Nature studies out of the RIKEN Institute in Japan and Harvard purporting to show an easy way to create stem cells. There was an interim report of RIKEN’s investigation last Friday, and more details emerged this week.

And today, the Japan Times reported that last week, a correction of a 2011 paper by many of the same authors appeared in Tissue Engineering Part A. Here’s the correction notice, dated March 13: Continue reading Authors of controversial STAP stem cell study author correct 2011 paper

Researchers invent time machine! (But too late to avoid retraction for duplication)

compinterfaceA common theme in movies involving time travel is that if you meet yourself in the past, you’ll upset the time-space continuum, and cause all sorts of problems. Well, a group of materials scientists in Hong Kong seems to have invented a time machine, and learned that if if you publish a paper that appears to have been published in the future, you’ll suffer a retraction (and correction) for duplicating your own data.

We’ll (try to) explain.

The group in 1997 published a paper in Composite Interfaces titled “Reliability of fiber Bragg grating sensors embedded in textile composites.”

But now comes the following — inscrutable — Corrigendum: Continue reading Researchers invent time machine! (But too late to avoid retraction for duplication)

Following criticism, PLOS apologizes, clarifies new data policy

plosIn response to “an extraordinary outpouring of discussions on open data and its place in scientific publishing” following a February 24 announcement about a new data policy at PLOS, the publisher has apologized and corrected the record.

The new policy — which was actually first announced on January 23, as we noted here — had led to criticism at the DrugMonkey blog, and a February 26 clarification seemed to do little to convince another critic. (Not all disagreed with the policy, however.)

In particular, there were objections to a section that began with Continue reading Following criticism, PLOS apologizes, clarifies new data policy

Immunology researcher with Expression of Concern has cluster of recent retractions, corrections

j heart lung transplantXia Jiahong, an immunology researcher at Huazhong Science and Technology University in Wuhan, China, who had a paper subject to a fascinating Expression of Concern earlier this month, turns out to have had a few other entries in his retraction and correction record recently.

Here’s a retraction in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, for “Combined treatment with chemokine receptor 5 blocker and cyclosporine induces prolonged graft survival in a mouse model of cardiac transplantation,” a paper first published in 2010: Continue reading Immunology researcher with Expression of Concern has cluster of recent retractions, corrections

Shigeaki Kato up to 23 retractions

katoShigeaki Kato, the former University of Tokyo endocrinology researcher found to have manipulated images in dozens of papers, has six more retractions, bringing his total to 23.

Five of them appear in Molecular and Cellular Biology: Continue reading Shigeaki Kato up to 23 retractions

Misconduct at Oxford prompts retraction of insulin paper

cellmetabcoverCell Metabolism has retracted a 2006 article by a group of researchers at Oxford in England after an investigation concluded that the first author had committed misconduct.

The paper, “Nicotinamide nucleotide transhydrogenase: A key role in insulin secretion,” came from the lab of Frances Ashcroft, a world-renowned expert on ion channels. (We’ve written about Ashcroft’s lab before.)

According to the abstract: Continue reading Misconduct at Oxford prompts retraction of insulin paper

A retracted retraction: Backsies for an anti-terrorism paper

Nasrullah Memon
Nasrullah Memon

The other day, we wrote about a puzzling situation that appeared to involve the ninth retraction for an anti-terrorism researcher. A book chapter by Nasrullah Memon, of the University of Southern Denmark, was marked “Retracted,” both in the abstract’s title and on the PDF. But Memon forwarded us an email from Springer, the book’s publisher, saying that they had decided to publish an erratum rather than retract.

And indeed, sometime after we published our post, the retraction was changed to an erratum, with the following notice: Continue reading A retracted retraction: Backsies for an anti-terrorism paper

Former NIH scientist falsified images in hepatitis study: ORI

Baoyan Xu, via NIH
Baoyan Xu, via NIH

A former postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) committed misconduct in a study of hepatitis by falsely claiming that data from a single trial subject were actually from more than a dozen different people, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found.

The investigation was prompted by allegations made by readers of the paper. Baoyan Xu made what the ORI called “a limited admission” that “some better looking strips were repeatedly used as representatives for several times [sic].”

According to a report of the ORI’s findings to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, the paper, “Hybrid DNA virus in Chinese patients with seronegative hepatitis discovered by deep sequencing, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Continue reading Former NIH scientist falsified images in hepatitis study: ORI