A March paper by researchers at Imperial College London that, in the words of the Washington Post, “helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies,” cited a preprint that had been withdrawn.
Retraction Watch became aware of the issue after being contacted by a PubPeer commenter who had noted the withdrawalearlier this month. Following questions from Retraction Watch this weekend, the authors said they plan to submit a correction.
Sometimes scientific findings can be too hot to handle. Literally.
A team of researchers in India and Japan who reported breakthrough results in two papers about electromagnetics, including an article in Science, are retracting the articles because the exciting data resulted from experimental error. To be precise: unbeknownst to them, inadvertent heating of their samples had contaminated their data.
The first author of both articles is Chanchal Sow, of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. The last author on both is Yoshiteru Maeno, a professor of physics at Kyoto University.
Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern about a 2020 paper on the genetics of colorectal cancer by a group in China whose results were pegged on a test that couldn’t have produced the findings.
The article, “Circulating tumor DNA methylation profiles enable early diagnosis, prognosis prediction, and screening for colorectal cancer,” appeared in January, with authors from both academia and an outfit called the Guangzhou Youze Biological Pharmaceutical Technology Company.
A schematic based on the now-retracted findings, as published in newspapers
A study which found that aerosolized novel coronavirus could be spread nearly 15 feet — twice what health officials had believed — has been retracted, but the journal isn’t saying why.
Practical Preventive Medicine published the paper in early March. Titled “An epidemiological investigation of 2019 novel coronavirus diseases through aerosol－borne transmission by public transport,” the authors, from institutions in China, looked at the spread of the virus on a bus linked to one infected passenger.
As Retraction Watch readers may recall, that’s a question we ask often. In 2018, for example, we wrote a post noting that nearly two years after the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had requested retractions, the journals had done nothing. Some of the papers have since been retracted.
We have occasion to ask the question again, about a different case at the University of Maryland.
The authors of a 2019 paper on rubber gloves have retracted their work after the journal to which they’d submitted their manuscript somehow missed their request to put a hold on the article.
After more than four years of doing, well, not much, evidently, Scientific Reports — a Springer Nature title — has retracted a paper which plagiarized from the bachelor’s thesis of a Hungarian mathematician.
The article, “Modified box dimension and average weighted receiving time on the weighted fractal networks,” was purportedly written by a group of researchers from China led by Meifeng Dai, of the Nonlinear Scientific Research Center at Jiangsu University.
We have an update on a post we published late last month.
We reported on March 31 that Tissue Engineering had retracted a paper by Xing Wei, of the, National Engineering Research Center of Genetic Medicine at Jinan University, in Guangzhou, China, because of image manipulation. The retraction notice for that paper, “Use of Decellularized Scaffolds Combined with Hyaluronic Acid and Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor for Skin Tissue Engineering, referred to another paper in the journal that was being retracted, but had not yet been. It also referred to a paper in a different journal that showed signs of misconduct, but that had yet to be retracted, either.
We were checking this week to see if the other papers had been retracted, mostly just to make sure our database was up to date. The second paper, Promoting the Recovery of Injured Liver with Poly (3-Hydroxybutyrate-Co-3-Hydroxyvalerate-Co-3-Hydroxyhexanoate) Scaffolds Loaded with Umbilical Cord-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, has indeed been retracted, although the one in Tissue Engineering Constructs and Cell Substrates has not.
What was far more interesting, however, was that when we looked at a retraction notice for the first paper, we saw something we hadn’t seen in it before: Wei had earned an “indefinite ban” from publishing in the journal:
