Another busy week at Retraction Watch, which kicked off with our announcement that we’re hiring a paid intern. Here’s what was happening elsewhere around the web:
A group of authors in China has retracted their December 2013 paper in PLoS ONE after realizing that they’d been studying the wrong cells. The paper, “Up-Regulation of pVHL along with Down-Regulation of HIF-1α by NDRG2 Expression Attenuates Proliferation and Invasion in Renal Cancer Cells,” came from Lei Gao, of the Fourth Military Medical University, … Continue reading Wrong cell line leads to retraction of kidney cancer study
Chemist Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo, of the Institute of Life Sciences in Bhubaneswar, India, has earned his sixth retraction for image shennanigans, this time in Applied Materials & Interfaces. Sahoo, as we reported last year, had lost five articles in Acta Biomaterialia for what the journal called “highly unethical practices.” The latest retraction involves an article … Continue reading SK Sahoo notches sixth retraction
In response to “an extraordinary outpouring of discussions on open data and its place in scientific publishing” following a February 24 announcement about a new data policy at PLOS, the publisher has apologized and corrected the record. The new policy — which was actually first announced on January 23, as we noted here — had … Continue reading Following criticism, PLOS apologizes, clarifies new data policy
The debate over the retraction of a highly controversial paper on the effects of GMOs on rats continues unabated. This week, Adriane Fugh-Berman and Thomas Sherman wrote on the Hastings Center website that
Last year, we wrote about two retractions by Pamela Ronald and colleagues, after the group found that a bacterial strain they’d been using was contaminated. The group has now published a paper in PeerJ following their investigation into what went wrong. Ronald tells us the new paper, titled “The Xanthomonas Ax21 protein is processed by … Continue reading Following up: Pamela Ronald publishes updated data following two retractions
Retraction Watch readers will no doubt be familiar with the fact that retraction rates are rising, but one of the unanswered questions has been whether that increase is due to more misconduct, greater awareness, or some combination of the two. In a new paper in PLOS Medicine, Daniele Fanelli, who has studied misconduct and related … Continue reading “Why Growing Retractions Are (Mostly) a Good Sign”: New study makes the case
Two researchers who have appeared frequently on Retraction Watch have racked up another retraction each. This is the fourteenth retraction for Alirio Melendez, who was found guilty of misconduct by the National University of Singapore but denies the allegations. Here’s the notice in The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology for “Environmental toxicogenomics: A … Continue reading Melendez notches retraction 14, Lemus now stands at 12
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has a fairly gory correction — we’d call it a mega-correction — for a 2010 paper by Levon Khachigian, an Australian researcher whose studies of a new drug for skin cancer recently were halted over concerns about possible misconduct, including image manipulation. As we reported earlier this year, Khachigian has … Continue reading JBC issues correction for paper by Khachigian, who has had four others retracted
We’ll say it again: We like being able to point out when researchers stand up and do the right thing, even at personal cost. In December 2011, Pamela C. Ronald, of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues published a paper in PLOS ONE,”Small Protein-Mediated Quorum Sensing in a Gram-Negative Bacterium.” Such quorum sensing research … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Researchers retract quorum sensing paper after public process