Salon today retracted a controversial 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about an alleged link between autism and thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccines. As Salon explains in their retraction notice, the online magazine had co-published the piece with Rolling Stone. The notice reads, in part:
A leading Japanese virologist has received a 10-year publishing ban from the American Society of Microbiology after many of his published articles were found to have evidence of data manipulation. In its January 2011 issue, Infection and Immunity, an ASM title, is retracting five articles by the researcher, Naoki Mori, of the University of Ryukyus … Continue reading Japanese virologist hit with publishing ban after widespread data manipulation
Readers of this blog are aware that many of the retractions we’ve covered involve the misadventures of post-docs. That makes some superficial sense: post-docs, after all, are trainees, and therefore might be more likely to make mistakes. They’re also hungry to break into their chosen specialty, and how better to do that than by producing … Continue reading Small problem: Nano-micro journal pulls diabetes paper with phony figure
We have an update on the case of Olav and Axel Gressner, a father-son (or, in this case, son-father) pair of German liver researchers caught up in a fraud investigation. The inquiry focused on Olav, who left the University of Aachen under a cloud of suspicion. A 2008 research letter on which he was a … Continue reading Update on the Gressner case: Son Olav says he’s the unfairly targeted “bête noire”
The Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences has retracted a paper it published in August by Turkish researchers on the potential cancer risks associated with exposure to electromagnetic fields, or EMFs. The reason: Other people wrote nearly all of it. According to an editor’s notice:
Self-plagiarism alert: A very similar version of this post is being published online in Anesthesiology News, where one of us (AM) is managing editor. If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who herself has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer? That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer found … Continue reading Plagiarists plagiarized: A daisy chain of retractions at Anesthesia & Analgesia
Peer review isn’t a core subject of this blog. We leave that to the likes of Nature’s Peer-to-Peer, or even the Dilbert Blog. But it seems relevant to look at the peer review process for any clues about how retracted papers are making their way into press. We’re not here to defend peer review against … Continue reading Do peer reviewers get worse with experience? Plus a poll
Paging Dr. Murphy. In July, the editors of Cancer Biology & Therapy published a retraction remarkable for its scope. Apparently, nearly everything dishonest authors can do to doctor a manuscript, these authors did. The paper, “Overexpression of transketolase protein TKTL1 is associated with occurrence and progression in nasopharyngeal carcinoma,” initially appeared on the journal’s website … Continue reading Best of Retractions Part III: Whatever can go wrong …
The title of this post is stolen, with adoring attribution, from a piece in the November 16, 2010 issue of Autophagy, because we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. In the piece, the journal’s editor, Dan Klionsky, focuses on images. It reads, in part:
The title of this post is a question that we’ve been asking ourselves since we started Retraction Watch in August, and that others have asked us since. And we’ve gotten different answers depending where we look: In our first post, we cited a study that found 328 retractions in Medline in the decade from 1995 … Continue reading So how many retractions are there every year, anyway?