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A researcher who has had more than 40 papers questioned by scientific sleuths has lost a second to retraction.
On December 14, Elisabeth Bik reported problems in 39 papers coauthored by Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China, to the editors of the journals that had published the papers. PubPeer commenters found problems in several other papers, and Bik tallied the 45 articles in a December 18 post.
In May, Tang lost a paper from PLOS ONE that Bik had flagged for the journal all the way back in 2015 — a delay that is not unusual for the journal, but becoming less common.
But the response this time was swift, at least for one journal. DNA and Cell Biology, a Mary Ann Liebert title, retracted “microRNA-34a-Upregulated Retinoic Acid-Inducible Gene-I Promotes Apoptosis and Delays Cell Cycle Transition in Cervical Cancer Cells” this week. (The exact date of the retraction is unclear, as Bik notes below.)
Here’s the notice:
Continue reading “This retraction is one of the fastest I ever experienced after reporting a paper to a journal editor.”