Category: corrections

Royal jelly figure flushed: Author removes figure from 2002 paper

j biochemRoyal jelly — “the goo that sustains honeybees destined for royalty” and is touted dubiously for everything “from youthful skin to virility,” as Nature put it — is apparently a hot research topic. So when a Retraction Watch tipster sent us a corrigendum that seemed to have done something we hadn’t seen before — retract a single figure, without saying why — we figured we’d check it out.

Here’s the text of the corrigendum: Continue reading Royal jelly figure flushed: Author removes figure from 2002 paper

Irritation turns to aggravation in Neuroscience correction

neuroscience1212 coverNeuroscience has an amusing correction in one of its December issues, involving a paper that appeared in its November 2011 issue on Parkinson’s disease by a group from Germany.

As the notice explains: Continue reading Irritation turns to aggravation in Neuroscience correction

Image correction in Current Biology for Harvard’s Sam Lee

The work of Sam W. Lee, a cancer biologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, has come under fire at Science Fraud lately over concerns about the possible reuse of images in his group’s published studies.

Turns out there’s some there, there after all. The journal Current Biology has issued a pretty thorny correction for one of Lee’s 2006 articles, “RhoE Is a Pro-Survival p53 Target Gene that Inhibits ROCK I-Mediated Apoptosis in Response to Genotoxic Stress,” citing multiple issues with its figures: Continue reading Image correction in Current Biology for Harvard’s Sam Lee

Correction for MD Anderson’s Bharat Aggarwal arches eyebrows for the right reasons

We’ve written about mega-corrections that allow scientists to retrace virtually all of their steps yet preserve their publications as supposedly legitimate. And we’ve seen plenty of corrections that allow authors to assert that their conclusions are correct when evidently important pieces of data are themselves unreliable.

Now comes a correction that seems to us to strike the right chords, given the fact that editors are to a large extent at the mercy of authors in these situations. Continue reading Correction for MD Anderson’s Bharat Aggarwal arches eyebrows for the right reasons

University clears leading dermatology lab head of misconduct as authors issue two corrections

Michael Hertl, a leading dermatology researcher at Philipps-University Marburg, has been cleared of any wrongdoing in a case that spawned a retraction last year and two just-published retractions.

Felicitas Riedel, a legal officer for the university, tells Retraction Watch that the

…Committee for Scientific Misconduct of the Philipps-University Marburg closed the matter and submitted its results to the President of the University who in the meantime after examination consented with it.

The findings? Continue reading University clears leading dermatology lab head of misconduct as authors issue two corrections

Reused figures lead to two chemistry retractions, one correction

Why just have three peer-reviewed publications when you can reuse figures to publish a fourth?

That’s the sort of thinking that got one research group slapped with a retraction of their 2009 study, “Carbon Nanotubes Are Able To Penetrate Plant Seed Coat and Dramatically Affect Seed Germination and Plant Growth.”

The journal ACS Nano, published by the American Chemical Society, issued the retraction on Aug. 20: Continue reading Reused figures lead to two chemistry retractions, one correction

Authors, including highly cited cancer researcher, blame “clerical error” for image mixup in paper

The Journal of Experimental Medicine has issued a correction for a 2011 paper by Michael Karin, a prominent cancer researcher at the University of California, San Diego, after learning about a “clerical error” in one of the figures.

According to the notice for the article, “Constitutive intestinal NF-κB does not trigger destructive inflammation unless accompanied by MAPK activation,” Continue reading Authors, including highly cited cancer researcher, blame “clerical error” for image mixup in paper

Duplication earns highly cited prostate cancer researcher a correction in JCO

Laurence Klotz, a prominent urologist at the University of Toronto who studies the prostate specific antigen (PSA), has corrected a paper after reusing his own words from an earlier review.

Here’s the correction, from the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO): Continue reading Duplication earns highly cited prostate cancer researcher a correction in JCO

A correction for Alirio Melendez, in Journal of Cellular Physiology

We’ve been covering the case of Alirio Melendez, three of whose papers have been retracted amidst questions about almost 70 studies. The latest development is a correction in the Journal of Cellular Physiology, which has already retracted one of his papers, of a study on which he was a co-author.

Here’s the correction for “Short dysfunctional telomeres impair the repair of arsenite-induced oxidative damage in mouse cells”: Continue reading A correction for Alirio Melendez, in Journal of Cellular Physiology

Fireworks: Belgian dispute over ovarian transplant findings includes claims of theft, arson

There’s a story brewing in Belgium that is, as one local newspaper put it, worthy of a TV drama.

Here’s our attempt at a summary: Jacques Donnez, chair of Catholic University of Louvain’s (UCL) gynecology department, and colleagues published two studies in Human Reproduction in 2010. One study claimed to show that a woman had given birth after undergoing chemotherapy for severe sickle cell disease and then getting an ovarian transplant from her sister.

The other of those studies, the authors noted, confirmed “data published earlier as a case report” in 2007. That case report of a woman with another type of anemia — the pregnancy only went as far as an embryo, which did not survive — garnered a good deal of attention, because, as New Scientist reported: Continue reading Fireworks: Belgian dispute over ovarian transplant findings includes claims of theft, arson