A group of researchers in Ireland has retracted their 2013 article on a possible new method for treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS, also commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease — after identifying errors in several images in the paper. The article, “Acidotoxicity and acid-sensing ion channels contribute to motoneuron degeneration,” was published online in Cell … Continue reading ALS paper retracted for figure problems
mBio, whose editor, Arturo Casadevall, has contributed greatly to our knowledge about why articles are retracted, has an interesting retraction of its own. The journal — a publication of the American Society for Microbiology and the American Academy of Microbiology — is pulling a 2011 paper by a trio of researchers from the University of … Continue reading mBio retracts anthrax paper whose authors say they misinterpreted findings
The Brazilian medical journal Clinics — edited by the Faculdade de Medicina of the University of São Paulo — has lost two more papers in a citation stacking scheme that cost one of the authors his job as editor of the publication. The first paper, by former editor Mauricio Rocha-e-Silva and Ariane Gomes, was titled … Continue reading Medical journal guilty of citation manipulation retracts two “inadequate” review articles
The Danish Committees for Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) is calling for the retraction of a politically sensitive article by Helmuth Nyborg, a controversial Danish psychologist, over concerns about referencing and authorship. The 2011 paper, “The Decay of Western Civilization: Double Relaxed Darwinian Selection,” appeared in Personality and Individual Differences, a prestigious journal in the field, and … Continue reading Citing “scientific dishonesty,” Danish board calls for retraction of controversial paper on decline of Western civilization
We’ve always like to highlight cases in which scientists do the right thing and retract problematic papers themselves, rather than being forced to by editors and publishers. Apparently, according to a new paper by economists and management scholars, scientists reward that sort of behavior, too. The study by Benjamin Jones of the Kellogg School of … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Scientists reward authors who report their own errors, says study
The Journal of Neuroscience‘s retraction notices often give us plenty to chew on, and a new Expression of Concern does the same. In the notice — for a 16-year-old paper — the journal notes three cases of what certainly sounds like image manipulation, but carefully avoids calling it that:
A plant scientist at the Colorado State University has retracted a fifth paper. Here’s the notice for “Influence of ATP-binding cassette transporters in root exudation of phytoalexins, signals, and in disease resistance, a paper originally published in July 2012: The Journal, Chief Editor and the Authors wish to retract the Original Research article cited above … Continue reading Image manipulation leads to fifth retraction for plant research group
We’ve sometimes said, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, that pre-publication peer review is the worst way to vet science, except for all the other ways that have been tried from time to time. The authors of a new paper in PLOS Biology, Adam Eyre-Walker and Nina Stoletzki, compared three of those other ways to judge more than … Continue reading Is impact factor the “least-bad” way to judge the quality of a scientific paper?
We tend to stick to retractions in the peer-reviewed literature here at Retraction Watch, although we’ve made exceptions. Today’s post seemed like a good reason to make another exception, because while Nature Publishing Group-owned Scientific American is not a peer-reviewed journal, the science blogosphere and Twitter are lighting up this weekend with strong reactions to … Continue reading Scientific American faces firestorm after removing blog post about scientist being called a whore
Like Howard Beale, the character in 1976’s “Network” who famously said “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!,” the editors of the journal Cortex have decided they’ve had enough when it comes to plagiarism. From an editorial in the current issue: We will treat academic plagiarism as a misdeed, … Continue reading Neuroscience journal takes tough stance on plagiarism