Master’s students have retracted a review of an internal meeting of stem cell researchers because it contained confidential information. According to the Managing Director of the society, Stem Cell Network North Rhine Westphalia (NRW), the event was not open to the public, and the authors had not contacted either the society or the scientists they cited … Continue reading Students withdraw report of private stem cell retreat
The week at Retraction Watch featured the launch of the greatest journal ever, and a story about the backlash against widely covered research on why men eat more. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A journal has retracted a 2011 study at the request of Columbia University. According to Jeanine D’Armiento, the study’s last author, the newly retracted paper in Clinical Science contained a figure from a Journal of Hypertension paper published by the same authors earlier that year. First and corresponding author Joseph George told Retraction Watch the error was unintentional. … Continue reading Columbia University probe prompts retraction of cardiovascular paper
Sometimes, a seemingly run-of-the-mill retraction notice turns out to be much less straightforward. Such was the case with a recent retraction of a 2016 paper in a journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, apparently over permission to use an evaluation scale designed to test whether patients take their medications as … Continue reading If you use this research tool without permission, you’ll hear about it
An oncology journal has retracted a 2014 paper that contained a potentially fatal mistake. Specifically, the paper suggested that a chemotherapy drug be injected intrathecally — i.e., in the spine. But according to the retraction notice, the medical literature has unequivocally shown that that form of treatment is “uniformly fatal.” The retraction comes approximately 18 months after … Continue reading Dangerous chemo mistake retracted by journal after two years
Researchers have retracted a biology paper that included an image mismatch — despite the fact that, as they claim, another image in the same paper confirms the original findings. The authors say they plan to resubmit the paper with the corrected figure panel. The second to last author — Carlo Croce, chair of the department of … Continue reading Journal retracts paper due to image mismatch; one co-author alleges fraud
The former president of the Joslin Diabetes Center has withdrawn a second article within a month of his first, and issued extensive corrections to another paper in the same journal, all due to figure errors. In November, we reported that Carl Ronald Kahn — also affiliated with Harvard Medical School — had pulled a highly cited 2005 … Continue reading Prominent Harvard researcher issues second retraction, again citing duplication
Researchers in China have retracted two 2016 papers about the possible use of a cholesterol-lowering agent to treat bleeding on the brain. One of the retracted papers in the Journal of Neurosurgery (JNS) had multiple problems that were “too extensive to revise,” according to the lengthy retraction notice, relating to issues with authorship, data analyses, … Continue reading Authors retract two statin papers, one with problems “too extensive to revise”
The week at Retraction Watch featured a discussion of whether peer reviewers should replicate experiments, and a look at whether social psychology really has a retraction problem. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A journal has retracted a surgery study by researchers at Brown University after noticing it included data that was not intended for research purposes. (Incidentally, the data were collected by the publisher of the journal.) Ingrid Philbert, managing editor of the Journal of Graduate Medical Education — which published the paper — told Retraction Watch … Continue reading Journal retracts surgery study with data “not intended for use in research”