The authors of a 2008 study purporting to explain how the herbicide atrazine acts on cancer cells have asked the journal that published it to retract it for “inadvertent errors,” Retraction Watch has learned. The notice for “G-Protein-Coupled Receptor 30 and Estrogen Receptor-a are Involved in the Proliferative Effects Induced by Atrazine in Ovarian Cancer … Continue reading Herbicide-ovarian cancer study to be retracted
It’s really hard to get papers retracted, police might be best-equipped to handle scientific misconduct investigations, and there’s finally software that will identify likely image manipulation. Those are three highlights from a number of pieces that have appeared in Nature and Nature Medicine in the past few weeks. Not surprisingly, there are common threads, so … Continue reading Should scientific misconduct be handled by the police? It’s fraud week at Nature and Nature Medicine
It’s been a busy week here at Retraction Watch, with breaking news about hotly debated papers from Nature and about GMOs, but there have been interesting stories about retractions and scientific misconduct elsewhere, too. Here’s a sampling:
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:
MIT’s Robert Weinberg, a leading cancer researcher who retracted a Cancer Cell paper earlier this year for “inappropriate presentation” of figures, has corrected a different paper in the same journal. Here’s the correction for “Species- and Cell Type-Specific Requirements for Cellular Transformation:” We were apprised recently of errors made in the assembly of Figures 2B, … Continue reading A Cancer Cell mega-correction for highly cited researcher who retracted paper earlier this year
A lab run by a Canada Research Chair at the Ottawa Research Institute has retracted a paper — in a journal the chair edits — for what sounds a lot like inappropriate image manipulation. Here’s the notice from Skeletal Muscle:
University of Glasgow professor Foo Yew “Eddy” Liew, a Fellow of the Royal Society, has retracted a paper in Cellular Immunology because it duplicated one of his earlier papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here’s the notice for “Expression and function of Toll-like receptor on T cells:”
We have a follow-up from last week’s story about a University College London (UCL) investigation into the work of Giulio Cossu that found errors but no “deliberate intention to mislead.”UCL said it will not make the full report available:
A cell biologist at University College London (UCL) who has had one paper retracted and another corrected has been cleared of misconduct by the university. The news, first reported by Times Higher Education, comes after a retraction of a paper by Giulio Cossu prompted by pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis that we wrote about in January. … Continue reading UCL finds errors in work by biologist Cossu, but no “deliberate intention to mislead”
A 1984 paper in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B is now subject to a notice of redundant publication because a lot of it had been published in Cell the same year. Whether 28 years — 27 years and 9 months, to be precise — is any kind of official record is unclear, since … Continue reading A new record? 27-plus years later, a notice of redundant publication