The FASEB Journal has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), looking at the role of a tumor-suppressing micro-RNA in pulmonary fibrosis. The retraction suggests the provenance of the data are in question, and we learned details of what went wrong.
Here’s the notice, which, sadly, is behind a $12-per-day paywall: Continue reading Author retracts FASEB Journal paper for data reuse
A paper that shares a first author with a paper retracted in December has been corrected.
Late last year, we reported on a retraction in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling (ARDS) by Indika Edirisinghe, who was at the University of Rochester when the original paper was published, and colleagues. On January 17, the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry published a correction to “Effect of Black Currant Anthocyanins on the Activation of Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (eNOS) in Vitro in Human Endothelial Cells,” on which Edirisinghe is also first author.
His affiliation on that paper, originally published in July 2011, is the Illinois Institute of Technology. Here’s the correction: Continue reading First author of recently retracted paper has another corrected, in J Ag Food Chem
Last year, an audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found “a potential for unnecessary duplication” among the billions of dollars in research grants funded by national agencies. Some researchers, it seemed, could be winning more than one grant to do the same research.
Prompted by that report, Virginia Tech’s Skip Garner and his colleagues used eTBLAST, which Garner invented, to review more than 630,000 grant applications submitted to the NIH, NSF, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, “the largest charitable funder of breast cancer research in the United States.” The approach was not unlike those by publishers to identify potential article duplications.
In a Comment published today in Nature, they report that they found 1,300 applications above a “similarity score” cutoff of 0.8 for federal agencies, and 0.65 for Komen documents — “with 1 indicating identical text in two same-length documents, and more than 1 representing identical text in one piece that is longer than the other.”
When they manually reviewed those 1,300: Continue reading Has “double-dipping” cost U.S. science funding agencies tens of millions of dollars?
We get accused of grabbing at cheap puns around here, but the headline above is meant to be taken straight up.
Three journals in the food sciences are retracting a trio of papers published last year on bacterial contamination in pork products because the articles used the same data sets — a classic (Platonic?) case of “salami slicing.”
The Journal of Food Protection, which published one of the articles, “Performance of three culture media commonly used for detecting Listeria monocytogenes,” has the following retraction notice:
Continue reading Salami slicing in pork research leads to retractions
An associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification, Retraction Watch has learned.
Concerns had been raised about four papers by Maya Saleh and colleagues: Continue reading McGill committee says Nature figures were “intentionally contrived and falsified”
Renewable Energy may cover conservation, but that doesn’t mean it expects its authors to recycle their own words. The Elsevier journal is retracting a biodiesel paper it published in February 2012 by a group of Chinese researchers who published much the same work in another title a month later. That periodical, the Journal of the American Oil Chemists Society, from Springer, has retracted its version as well.
Here’s the notice in Renewable Energy: Continue reading Hey authors, “Renewable Energy” doesn’t mean you can recycle words
A top cardiology researcher, Robert Hegele, of the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, has retracted a 15-year-old review after editors were made aware that it was “very similar” to another of his reviews.
Here’s the December 2012 notice for the paper, which has been cited 23 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Duplication leads to retraction of 1997 paper on heart disease genes
The next time a business professor in Thailand is looking for an ethics case study, he might look no further than the mirror.
Mohammad Asif Salam earned himself a five-year ban on publishing in a Springer journal after publishing work there that he’d already published elsewhere. Here’s the notice for “Corporate social responsibility in purchasing and supply chain,” a paper which appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics in 2009: Continue reading Do as I say, not as I do? Duplication in ethics journal earns author five-year publishing ban
Medical and Veterinary Entomology has retracted a 2010 paper by a group of German researchers who populated the article with data from previously published studies.
The article, titled “Established and emerging pathogens in Ixodes ricinus ticks collected from birds on a conservation island in the Baltic Sea,” looked at the potential role of migrating birds in the spread of tick-borne infections such as Lyme disease and babesiosis. Here’s the abstract: Continue reading Tick-borne disease paper retracted for data reuse
Two papers by researchers from China and Taiwan have been retracted from two journals, one based in the US, one in Croatia, after identical studies appeared in the June 2011 issues of both publications.
Eastern European Economics retracted their version first, and that journal’s editor discussed the case with the editors of Proceedings of Rijeka Faculty of Economics: Journal of Economics and Business, where the same paper was also published.
Eastern European Economics‘ retraction reads: Continue reading Duplicate analysis of Eastern Europe’s GDP retracted from two journals, one in US, one in Croatia