The week at Retraction Watch featured our annual roundup of the year’s top retractions for The Scientist, a retraction from Science, and claims about a book Aristotle never wrote. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Two papers by an overlapping group of researchers in Italy have been retracted for manipulated figures. In late 2013, perennial tipster Clare Francis sent their concerns about several papers, including the two that have been retracted, by authors who frequently publish together. One of the papers, in the Journal of Neurochemistry, is from a team led by Ferdinando Nicoletti; four other … Continue reading Cut and paste and a PC crash: figure manipulations sink two papers
A retracted 2008 paper originally flagged by Clare Francis has been republished in Environmental Health Perspectives with updated figures and new data. According to the editor’s note appended to the newly published paper, there was no evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the authors. The new paper went through peer review as an entirely new submission, and comes … Continue reading Retracted paper on herbicide-ovarian cancer connection republished
A pair of cell biologists have taken responsibility for extensive figure errors that scuttled their paper in the Journal of Cell Biology. While there were five authors, first and last authors Eva Szabo and Michal Opas took responsibility in the notice. A number of figures “contain incorrect data and/or presentation errors,” and the original data isn’t available … Continue reading Fat cell paper earns unusually detailed retraction
Prominent German diabetes researcher Kathrin Maedler has issued corrections on two papers, and told Retraction Watch she is in the process of defending the data on others. 14 of her papers have been critiqued by PubPeer commenters. The commentary, which spans from her graduate work in 2002 to a 2014 publication in Nature Medicine, includes questions about image manipulation and self-plagiarism. Laborjournal’s … Continue reading Leading diabetes researcher corrects paper as more than a dozen studies are questioned on PubPeer
Sinead Miggin, a biologist at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, has withdrawn two papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) and has corrected another paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here’s the opaque JBC notice for “14-3-3ϵ and 14-3-3σ inhibit Toll-like receptor (TLR)-mediated proinflammatory cytokine induction,” a paper … Continue reading Scientist in Ireland notches two mysterious retractions and a correction
A group of cancer genetics researchers in Italy and the U.S. has retracted three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) after it became aware they had duplicated some bands in their figures. Here are the three papers:
The Journal of Clinical Investigation is retracting a 2004 paper by a cancer researchers from Italy because of “evident misrepresentation of data and image duplication.” Here’s the notice for “The IL-12Rβ2 gene functions as a tumor suppressor in human B cell malignancies:”
Bharat Aggarwal, the MD Anderson researcher who has threatened to sue Retraction Watch for writing about issues in his papers, has corrected another study. Here’s the notice for “Induction of Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis by the Proteasome Inhibitor PS-341 in Hodgkin Disease Cell Lines Is Independent of Inhibitor of Nuclear Factor-κB Mutations or Activation … Continue reading Cancer researcher who threatened to sue Retraction Watch corrects another paper
Alfredo Fusco, a cancer researcher in Italy who is facing a criminal investigation for fraud, has had two more papers retracted.