I have been Editor-in-Chief of DNA and Cell Biology for the last decade. It has been rare for authors to request withdrawal of a paper they have submitted. However, in the last two weeks, six papers have been withdrawn on request.
What really puzzled Reiss, a professor emerita at New York University, was that two of the withdrawals used identical language — down to the incorrect punctuation and stilted phrasing:
A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.
The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2020 paper by researchers in Korea who have used 3-D printing to create artificial eyes for dogs.
The study triggered a slew of critical comments from readers, who were outraged by the ethics of the research and what they saw as inadequate protections for the animals against pain.
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on a study of a potential treatment for autism.
The article, by a group in Slovakia, purported to show for the first time that the drug ubiquinol — a form of the compound coenzyme Q₁₀ — could improve the ability of children with autism to communicate with their parents, communicate verbally, play games with other children and help with other behaviors.
The paper was published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, a Hindawi journal. The first author was Anna Gvozdjáková, of Comenius University in Bratislava, and the last author was Fred Crane, a former biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Crane, who died in 2016, is credited with being the discoverer of coenzyme Q10 in mitochondria in 1957. The 2014 article — which has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was among the last of his 400-plus papers to appear in print.
The first author of a highly controversial — and now retracted — paper linking body weight to integrity calls the journal’s decision to pull the article “a bitter surprise” and its handling of the article after publication “deeply unfair.”
More than five months after outraged readers demanded that a Springer Nature journal retract a paper linking body mass index to honesty, the publication has been pulled.
The journal now says that a post-publication review of the article found that the data don’t support the authors’ conclusions — which is another way of saying that the pre-publication peer review missed that fact.
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2019 article by a Slovenian physicist who claims that both Creationism and Big Bang theory are wrong, and that black holes are the engines driving the universe.
In 2010, Šorli founded the Bijective Physics Institute, whose proponents — we’re not sure how many there are beyond him and a few others named on the site — believe:
Nicola Smith, credit Karl Welsch, Welsch Photography
In September 2019 Nicola Smith, a molecular pharmacologist in Australia, faced a brutal decision. She’d realized that she’d made a mistake — or rather, failed to catch a mistake in her group’s research before the crippling error was published — in two academic articles which were the culmination of years of work. And she could either tell the world, or pretend it never happened.
Her students had been having trouble reproducing lab data. Once she looked into it and she figured out why, she told them, “Guys, you’re not going to believe this.” A cloning error had ensured the experiments were doomed to fail from the start.
If she came clean, she knew that at least one of the articles would most likely be retracted and she’d have to live with a lasting mark on her and her team’s record. “What can I do to minimize the impact” on her two students? Smith thought at the time.
In particular, Tony Ngo,who was first author on both papers and had recently finished a PhD in her lab, was looking forward to a future in academia. Smith was terrified of tarnishing his prospects.
What was to stop her from just keeping quiet about it?
