Category: doing the right thing

The authors of a 2020 paper in Cell are earning plaudits after they retracted the study following the publication of an article last year that contradicted their earlier findings.

The paper, “Allosteric Activators of Protein Phosphatase 2A Display Broad Antitumor Activity Mediated by Dephosphorylation of MYBL2,” purported to show that a particular compound could be useful in animal studies because it did not have some of the off-target activity of other compounds. It has been cited 45 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But as the retraction notice says, a paper published last year in The EMBO Journal by Jakob Nilsson and Gianmatteo Vit of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found that wasn’t true:

Continue reading Doing the right thing: Harvard researchers retract Cell paper after work contradicts finding

As Jason Isbell sings, doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do. But sometimes it’s even harder than it needs to be. Ask Cory Xian. 

When Xian, a bone researcher at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide, and his colleagues found an error in their 2018 paper in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research — a top journal for the field — they notified the editors and asked for a retraction. But the journal demurred, instead issuing a correction for the article, titled “Release of CXCL12 From Apoptotic Skeletal Cells Contributes to Bone Growth Defects Following Dexamethasone Therapy in Rats.”

The correction states that “incorrect photos had been accidentally and mistakenly used by a staff person as representative photos”. 

Xian, the senior author of the article, told us: 

Continue reading Second time’s the charm: The author who requested a retraction twice

A group of researchers in Canada who’d collaborated with a one-time rising star in the bone field have retracted a 2014 article after determining that the data were unreliable.

They did so even though the paper was not a focus of the investigations into the work of Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, whose once sparkling career in endocrinology crumbled after an investigation found that she had fabricated data and took elaborate steps to cover her deception — from doctoring patient records to changing the temperature of a freezer at a government blood facility to damage samples that might reveal the fraud. 

Continue reading Doing the right thing: Co-authors of researcher who covered up data fakery retract paper

A “systematic error” in a mental health database has led to the retraction of a 2017 paper on how people with psychosis process facial expressions.

Joana Grave, a PhD student at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, and her colleagues published their article, “The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders,” in Psychiatry Research, an Elsevier title. 

According to the abstract of the paper: 

Continue reading ‘Please don’t be afraid to talk about your errors and to correct them.’

File this under “doing the right thing:” A group of stroke researchers in Germany have retracted a paper they published earlier this year after finding an error in their work shortly after publication that doomed the findings. 

Julian Klingbeil, of the Department of Neurology at the University of Leipzig Medical Center, and his colleagues had been looking at how the location of lesions in the brain left behind by cerebral strokes were associated with the onset of depression after the attacks. According to the study, “Association of Lesion Location and Depressive Symptoms Poststroke”:

Continue reading ‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke

Researchers in Australia have retracted a 2016 paper in Nature Chemical Biology after discovering a critical error in their research, bringing some closure to a gut-wrenching case for the scientists involved. 

As we reported in January, Nicola Smith, the senior author of the article, titled “Orphan receptor ligand discovery by pickpocketing pharmacological neighbors,” described learning of the error as “the most horrific time” of her career. 

Smith, then at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney (she’s now at the Orphan Receptor Laboratory at the University of New South Wales) told us that she briefly considered letting the flawed research — which has been cited 26 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — go uncorrected. 

After all, as one colleague told her, the subject of the studies was so arcane that 

Continue reading “The right decision”: Group retracts Nature Chemical Biology paper after finding a key error

Earlier this month, we reported on how Susanne Stoll, a graduate student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University College London, discovered an error that toppled a highly-cited 2014 article — and which might affect hundreds of other papers in the field of perception.

We spoke with Stoll about the experience. 

Retraction Watch (RW): What did it feel like to find such a significant error? Did you doubt yourself at first, and, if so when did you realize you’d found something both real and important? 

Continue reading ‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers