This week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a Cell paper by Harvard researchers and the retraction of a JCI study by NIH scientists. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A team spread across multiple institutions in China and McGill University in Canada has retracted two cancer papers over “inaccurate and inappropriately processed Western Blots.” Some of the figures were also reused between the two articles, both in Biochimica et Biophysica Acta General Subjects. The articles both tested the cancer-fighting properties of a derivative of … Continue reading Cancer team loses two papers for image manipulation
A 2014 Cancer Cell paper became the subject of an erratum in January 2015, shortly after PubPeer members began criticizing the data. However, many issues brought up by commenters weren’t addressed in the correction notice, including a figure that might be two experiments spliced together to look like one. The paper, led by Guido Franzoso at Imperial College … Continue reading Cancer Cell issues big correction over “incorrectly cropped” figures, other issues
PLoS ONE has just issued a 12-figure correction on a paper by Mario A. Saad, who sued the American Diabetes Association unsuccessfully in an attempt to prevent it from retracting four papers in its flagship journal Diabetes. The corrections include taking out Western blots copied from another Saad paper, as well as several figures where the bands … Continue reading PLoS ONE mega-correction, but no retraction, for researcher who sued diabetes journal
A retracted 2008 paper originally flagged by Clare Francis has been republished in Environmental Health Perspectives with updated figures and new data. According to the editor’s note appended to the newly published paper, there was no evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the authors. The new paper went through peer review as an entirely new submission, and comes … Continue reading Retracted paper on herbicide-ovarian cancer connection republished
Attorneys representing PubPeer in its defense against a subpoena by cancer researcher Fazlul Sarkar, of Wayne State University in Michigan, have submitted a motion to the Wayne County Circuit Court to quash the matter. Sarkar’s work has appeared on the anonymized post-publication peer review site, and he isn’t happy about it. In October, he sued … Continue reading PubPeer files motion to dismiss Sarkar defamation case
Cardiovascular Research has retracted a 2010 paper by a group of prominent cardiology researchers in Brazil. The reason: Image manipulation — which the authors say didn’t materially affect the conclusions of the paper. The article, “FAK mediates the activation of cardiac fibroblasts induced by mechanical stress through regulation of the mTOR complex,” came from a … Continue reading Heart journal pulls paper for image manipulation
Sinead Miggin, a biologist at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, has withdrawn two papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) and has corrected another paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here’s the opaque JBC notice for “14-3-3ϵ and 14-3-3σ inhibit Toll-like receptor (TLR)-mediated proinflammatory cytokine induction,” a paper … Continue reading Scientist in Ireland notches two mysterious retractions and a correction
A University of Calgary diabetes researcher, Cory Toth, who told us earlier this year that he would cease publishing in the scientific literature, has two more retractions, making seven. Both appear in Neurobiology of Disease. Here’s the notice for “Differential impact of diabetes and hypertension in the brain: Adverse effects in white matter:”
Another busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s a sampling of items about scientific publishing, research misconduct, and related issues from around the web: