This week at Retraction Watch featured a literally bullshit excuse for fake data, a new record for time from publication to retraction, and news of an upcoming retraction from Science. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: A celebrity surgeon’s double life; misconduct in sports medicine; researcher loses honor
Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding
The National Science Foundation will no longer fund a pair of chemists who “recklessly falsified data,” according to a report from the NSF’s Office of Inspector General, unless they “take specific actions to address issues” in a 2004 Science paper.
That paper is going to be retracted as soon as possible, Science told us. The co-authors that the NSF reprimanded are Bruce Eaton and Dan Feldheim, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder; they have been under scrutiny since 2008, when an investigation at North Carolina State University, their former employer, found that the Science paper contained falsified data.
The paper, “RNA-Mediated Metal-Metal Bond Formation in the Synthesis of Hexagonal Palladium Nanoparticles,” has been cited 138 times.
Science Editor in Chief Marcia McNutt told us today that a retraction is in the works:
Continue reading Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding
Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper
Authors are retracting a 2012 paper on cholesterol metabolism in zebrafish after realizing it included a case of mistaken identity in a DNA sequence crucial to some aspects of the experiment.
A postdoc misidentified the plasmid in question after failing to fully sequence it before including it in the experiment. A technician in the lab found the mistake, last author Steven Farber, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Maryland, explained:
When the omitted region was correctly sequenced we discovered it had an error.
He told us in a phone interview what that felt like:
We were like, holy crap.
Next came months of back and forth with the journal, discussing whether to correct or retract the paper. Farber tells us the mistake, which affects two figures,
was unfortunate. Most of the paper is in fact correct.
The paper, “Visualization of Lipid Metabolism in the Zebrafish Intestine Reveals a Relationship between NPC1L1-Mediated Cholesterol Uptake and Dietary Fatty Acid,” published in Chemistry & Biology, has been cited 21 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the detailed retraction note: Continue reading Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper
Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper
The corresponding author of a paper on testicular cancer is telling readers to discount a figure after she learned it may have been manipulated.
Although that one figure in the 2005 paper in the British Journal of Cancer may be problematic, the authors found data to support the other figures, and its conclusions.
This isn’t the first time first author Kerry Manton has faced questions over her data — in 2012, one of her papers was retracted following an investigation by her institution, the Queensland University of Technology. And in 2014, QUT repaid a $275,000 grant after finding Manton
failed to fulfill (her) responsibilities in relation to the responsible dissemination of research findings and that this, coupled with a failure to correct the errors, constituted research misconduct.
Here’s the corrigendum for “Hypermethylation of the 5′ CpG island of the gene encoding the serine protease Testisin promotes its loss in testicular tumorigenesis:”
Continue reading Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper
Retractions follow misconduct by biologist, one more on the way
Two journals have retracted papers by a biologist at the University of Tokyo who admitted to scientific misconduct, including data duplication and misrepresentation. Another journal is planning to retract one of the researcher’s papers later this month.
Hyun Kim studies a protein known as the “ski protein.” However, one analysis of the role of ski protein in development was retracted late last month by the Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences. The journal decided to investigate after Kim admitted to misconduct in two other papers published in a different journal.
Here’s the note for the paper:
Continue reading Retractions follow misconduct by biologist, one more on the way
Prostate cancer paper retracted after investigation can’t review original image
An article about how a COX-2 inhibitor (celecoxib) inhibits growth of prostate cancer in rats is being retracted after the authors were unable to provide an investigation committee at New York University with the backup they were asking for.
When the paper was published in 2003, first author Bhagavathi Narayanan worked at the Institute for Cancer Prevention in New York (also known as the American Health Foundation). But when the institute went broke the next year — thanks partly to lavish salaries and offices, as the New York Post reported — the authors claim they could no longer obtain back up for an image in the paper, once it was questioned years later by NYU, where Narayanan is now based.
Here’s the retraction note, published in Clinical Cancer Research:
Continue reading Prostate cancer paper retracted after investigation can’t review original image
Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device
To climate scientist Pieter Tans, a “novel” air sampling device in a recent paper looked a little too familiar. Specifically, like a device that he had invented — the AirCore, which he calls a “tape recorder” for air.
The journal editors came up with a unique solution to the disagreement that followed, which the editor in chief called “rather unclear:” The journal ran an editorial in which both Tans and the authors of the paper contend that their device is unique.
The paper in question, “A novel Whole Air Sample Profiler (WASP) for the quantification of volatile organic compounds in the boundary layer,” was published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. It has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
It now bears a note, in bold and red: “Please read the Editorial Note before accessing the paper.”
Here’s how the editorial laid out the case:
Continue reading Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device
Four retractions follow Swedish government findings of negligence, dishonesty
A Swedish ethical review board has censured two biologists and their employer, Uppsala University, for events related to “extensive image manipulations” in five papers published between 2010 and 2014. The case has led to criticism from an outside expert — who brought the allegations to Uppsala — over the current system in Sweden for handling such investigations.
Four of the papers have been retracted, and the authors have requested a correction in the fifth.
After an eight-month investigation, in September the government-run Expert Group for Scientific Misconduct at the Central Ethical Review Board in Stockholm, Sweden, concluded that Uppsala professor Kenneth Söderhäll — who has published more than 200 papers — and lecturer Irene Söderhäll acted “negligently” and “dishonestly” by Continue reading Four retractions follow Swedish government findings of negligence, dishonesty
New developments cause authors to pull paper on drugs’ environmental impact
The authors of an article about the effects of pharmaceutical drugs on the environment have retracted it before publishing the final version due to new developments in the field, which would have required a major revision.
The authors pulled the paper from Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management before it went through the final publication process – such as copyediting and proofreading – after they learned about new findings related to assessing to the risks of human exposures to pharmaceuticals in the environment.
We’d try to figure out which portions of the paper might need updating, but publisher Wiley recently pulled the original article and abstract, against the journal editor’s wishes.
Here’s the retraction note: Continue reading New developments cause authors to pull paper on drugs’ environmental impact
We have a new record: 80 years from publication to retraction
We have a new record for the longest time from publication to retraction: 80 years. It’s for a case report about a 24-year-old man who died after coughing up more than four cups of what apparently looked — and smelled — like pee.
According to the case report titled “Een geval van uroptoë” published in 1923, an autopsy revealed that the man had a kidney that was strangely located in his chest cavity. A case of pneumonia caused the kidney to leak urine into the space around his lungs, leading to the perplexing cough.
If that sounds too crazy to be true, you’re right: This man never existed. The case was retracted in 2003. (Yes, we are a little late to this one — it recently popped up in one of our Google alerts.)
A write-up by the editors of the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde — that translates to “Dutch Journal of Medicine” — explains that the strange case was a fake (on the fifth page of this PDF, in English):
Continue reading We have a new record: 80 years from publication to retraction