The Archives of Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery has retracted a study about whether developing fistula puts hemodialysis patients at higher risk of carpal tunnel syndrome because it “duplicated substantial parts” and “manipulated some original data” from a study by other researchers.
The retraction notice says it all: Continue reading Duplication, “manipulated” data send carpal tunnel paper down black hole
This week saw us profiled in The New York Times and de Volkskrant, and the introduction of our new staff writer. We also launched The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Duplication rampant in cancer research?; meet the data detective; journals behaving badly
Retraction Watch readers, please join us in welcoming Shannon Palus to our team.
Palus, who has written for Discover, Slate, The Atlantic, and a host of other publications, joined us last week. She has a B.Sc. in physics, with a minor in anthropology, from McGill, where she worked at The McGill Daily. Since graduating, she’s worked as an intern at Idaho National Lab and as a fact-checker for publications including Popular Science.
It was Palus’s eye as a fact-checker, along with her passion for truth-seeking and digging, that convinced us she was perfect for Retraction Watch. She writes: Continue reading Meet the new Retraction Watch staff writer, Shannon Palus
Springer has retracted two articles about groundwater in Algeria from its journal Environmental Earth Sciences – one was sent down the well by “copyright issues that cannot be resolved,” and the other by a duplicate publication two years prior.
The first article of the two, “Principal component, chemical, bacteriological, and isotopic analyses of Oued-Souf groundwaters,” was published in 2009 by researchers in Japan and Algeria. Its corresponding author, Hakim Saibi, is listed as an associate professor in the faculty of engineering at Kyushu University in Japan. We can’t say anything about the article’s content beyond what’s in the title, since its abstract is no longer available online. The retraction notice consists of a single, lonely sentence: Continue reading “Copyright issues that cannot be resolved” and duplicate publication sink two groundwater papers
An economist in Taiwan has retracted a paper about from Economic Development Quarterly because it was “published in error.”
The paper — first published online March 5, 2013 — addresses the influence of information and communication technology on economic growth.
According to the notice, the paper included “the original dataset and excerpts from an earlier draft of the paper co-written by the author and colleagues.” The only listed author, Yi-Chia Wang, asked that the article be retracted before making it into print, but it looks like it was included in the February, 2015 issue of the journal.
Here’s the notice for “How ICT Penetration Influences Productivity Growth: Evidence From 17 OECD Countries”: Continue reading “This article was published in error”: Economics paper defaults
Last month, the community was shaken when a major study on gay marriage in Science was retracted following questions on its funding, data, and methodology. The senior author, Donald Green, made it clear he was not privy to many details of the paper — which raised some questions for C. K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, and Drummond Rennie, a former deputy editor at JAMA. We are pleased to present their guest post, about how co-authors can carry out their responsibilities to each other and the community.
Just about everyone understands that even careful and meticulous people can be taken in by a smart, committed liar. What’s harder to understand is when a professional is fooled by lies that would have been prevented or caught by adhering to community norms and honoring one’s role and responsibilities in the scientific ecosystem.
Take the recent, sad controversy surrounding the now-retracted gay marriage study. We were struck by comments in the press by the co-author, Donald P. Green, on why he had not seen the primary data in his collaboration with first author Michael LaCour, nor known anything substantive about its funding. Green is the more senior scholar of the pair, the one with the established name whose participation helped provide credibility to the endeavor.
The New York Times quoted Green on May 25 as saying: “It’s a very delicate situation when a senior scientist makes a move to look at a junior scientist’s data set.”
Really?
A prominent biochemist and his co-author are pulling one of their papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry because…well, we’re not sure.
That’s because the retraction note is – as we’ve come to expect from JBC – not very informative.
Here’s the only explanation for the retraction of “The Down Syndrome Cell Adhesion Molecule (DSCAM) Interacts with and Activates Pak”:
Continue reading MacArthur awardee retracts signaling biology paper
A team of Columbia University biologists has retracted a 2013 Nature paper on the molecular pathways underlying Alzheimer’s disease, the second retraction from the group after a postdoc faked data.
An April report from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found the a first author, former Columbia postdoc Ryousuke Fujita, responsible for “knowingly and intentionally fabricating and falsifying research in seventy-four (74) panels” in three papers: a 2011 Cell paper retracted in 2014, an unpublished manuscript, and this now-retracted Nature paper, “Integrative genomics identifies APOE e4 effectors in Alzheimer’s disease.”
The paper was touted in a Columbia University Medical Center press release as identifying “key molecular pathways” leading to late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The paper fingered two potential molecular drug targets, as well.
Here is the full retraction notice: Continue reading Columbia biologists “deeply regret” Nature retraction, after postdoc faked 74 panels in 3 papers
Editors of the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering are retracting an editorial that presents guidelines for publishing in the journal because they mistakenly published it twice – once in June and once in November of last year.
(Presumably, one of the guidelines is to not publish the same article twice.)
Although the duplication was accidental, the corresponding author told us he wasn’t disappointed to learn more eyes may have seen the article: “It would not bother me if it were published in every issue.”
Here’s the retraction notice:
Continue reading Retraction after engineering journal presents new publishing guidelines — twice
Ever since we broke the news about the issues with the now-retracted Science paper about changing people’s minds on gay marriage, we’ve been the subject of a lot of press coverage, which has in turn led a number of people to ask us: Who has the most retractions?
Well, we’ve tried to answer that in our new Retraction Watch leaderboard.
Here is the current list (click here for more detailed information about our methodology and additional notes): Continue reading Who has the most retractions? Introducing the Retraction Watch leaderboard