One publisher appears to have retracted thousands of meeting abstracts. Yes, thousands.

ieeeHere at Retraction Watch, we’ve covered somewhere shy of 2,000 retractions in our nearly five years of existence. With this post, we may be more than doubling that total count.

That’s because it looks like IEEE may have retracted thousands of meeting abstracts. Yes, thousands.

We don’t know the exact number, but a search for “retraction” in the abstracts of the 2011 International Conference on E-Business and E-Government (ICEE), held May 6-8 2011, brings up 1,281 results.

The same search on the site of the 5th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (iCBBE), May 10-12, 2011, brings up 1,085 results.

We only opened the first few retraction notices, but they seem to all be the same. Headed “Notice of Retraction,” they read: Continue reading One publisher appears to have retracted thousands of meeting abstracts. Yes, thousands.

Lost your data? Blame an earthquake

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A natural disaster is to blame for a retraction about lethal brain tumors. At least, that’s where the authors say the problem started: with a 2010 earthquake that caused a loss of “substantial data.”

The paper, “Superoxide-dependent uptake of vitamin C in human glioma cells,” looks at how the cells of lethal brain tumors interact with the vitamin commonly used to reduce side effects of therapies.

Post earthquake, someone digitally filled in a western blot analysis of proteins from a cell line and rat brains, as a “temporary solution.” And then the temporary solution made its way into the Journal of Neurochemistry.

Here’s the retraction note from the journal, including an image of the sneaky western blot:

Continue reading Lost your data? Blame an earthquake

Oncogene to retract breast cancer paper following years-old misconduct investigation

Oncogene is retracting a 2010 paper on the molecular details of breast cancer cells as they undergo metastasis following an investigation that discovered the first author had committed misconduct.

The thing is, the investigation concluded in 2012, and the paper — “miR-661 expression in SNAI1-induced epithelial to mesenchymal transition contributes to breast cancer cell invasion by targeting Nectin-1 and StarD10 messengers” — isn’t being retracted until next week.

According to Lucinda Haines, senior publishing manager at Nature Publishing Group, the paper will be retracted June 29.

We heard from Iris Behrmann, Head of the Life Sciences Research Unit at the University of Luxembourg:

Continue reading Oncogene to retract breast cancer paper following years-old misconduct investigation

Lancet Oncology updates conflicts of interest statement for cancer-cell phone paper

lanoncThe Lancet Oncology is correcting a 2011 article about the cancer risks of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields, such as those from cell phones, to clarify information about potential conflicts of interest for one of the experts who was involved in its preparation.

The assessments appeared as a monograph for the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

However, after the 2011 paper “Carcinogenicity of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields” appeared, a reader raised allegations of conflicts of interest among its participants, which sparked a reconsideration of their disclosures.

The correction concerns the conflicts of interest for Niels Kuster of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, also a board member of the non-profit IT’IS foundation.

Kuster told Retraction Watch he disclosed everything upfront:

Continue reading Lancet Oncology updates conflicts of interest statement for cancer-cell phone paper

Beekeeper association stung by retraction after posting accusations about major honey processor

American Honey Producers AssociationThe American Honey Producers Association has apparently retracted an online article that said Honey Holding — a.k.a Honey Solutions, an industrial honey processor — had been charged with tax evasion and illegally selling Chinese honey containing corn syrup and sugar. According to the note:

AHPA has removed the article from its website, and is correcting and retracting the inaccurate statements with this posting.

The allegations were posted in the News section of the AHPA’s website in March, according to Honey Holding. The company said that the information was obtained from a since retracted Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article published two days before.

Here’s more from the note from the AHPA:

Continue reading Beekeeper association stung by retraction after posting accusations about major honey processor

“Proven plagiarism” extracts paper on keeping teeth healthy in outer space

12548Aeronautic dentistry seems like a fairly unique field, but a review article about keeping teeth healthy in outer space has been retracted from the International Journal of Stomatology & Occlusion Medicine for not being quite unique enough.

“Aeronautic dentistry: an upcoming branch,” a review article, appears to have lifted pieces of other works “verbatim and without citation,” according to a representative from the journal’s publisher.

According to the first author, any plagiarism was purely accidental:

The amount of material which seems to be plagiarised was not done intentionally.

The retraction note is a single line: Continue reading “Proven plagiarism” extracts paper on keeping teeth healthy in outer space

Northwestern pulls bioethics publication with oral sex essay, reposts one year later

atrium-issue12Northwestern University has reposted a publication from the Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program at the Feinberg School of Medicine that included a controversial essay about oral sex, after it was pulled for more than a year.

The essay was included in an issue guest edited by faculty member Alice Dreger—who penned a post for us in March about the ways in which attacks on academic freedom have increased, during the time her own publication had been taken offline.

The essay, “Head Nurses,” presents the story of William Peace, who wrote that he received oral sex from a nurse after he became paralyzed at the age of 18:

Continue reading Northwestern pulls bioethics publication with oral sex essay, reposts one year later

Duplication of “a major part of text and results” adds up to third retraction for mathematician

Source: www.ed.gov
Source: www.ed.gov

An article by Alexander Spivak, a mathematician based in Israel, is being retracted from the proceedings of a 2014 numerical analysis meeting because Spivak had already published “a major part of text and results” in a mathematics journal in 2010.

Spivak, a member of the faculty of sciences at Holon Institute of Technology, has a bit of a history with the journal that published his initial 201o paper, the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. That journal retracted two of his papers last year after learning from Zeev Schuss, Spivak’s post-doc supervisor at Tel Aviv University, that those papers contained plagiarized chunks from a paper by Schuss and two colleagues.

Here’s more from the retraction notice for “Successive approximations for optimal control in some nonlinear systems with small parameter”, published in the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Numerical Analysis:

Continue reading Duplication of “a major part of text and results” adds up to third retraction for mathematician

Food fight: Animal nutrition author disputes two retractions

LSA pair of animal nutrition researchers in India have now had a second paper on the nutritional value of a fungal treatment for wheat straw retracted, and one of the authors is very unhappy about it.

M.S. Mahesh of the National Dairy Research Institute at Deemed University claims a co-author issued “abusive letters” to an editor of the journal where the first paper was retracted (which said co-author denies), and that editors responsible for the second retraction removed the paper “unscientifically and unethically.”

The second paper, in Livestock Science, describes the treatment of wheat straw, a wheat by-product, with a fungus in an effort to improve the nutritional worth of the straw. It has a similar title, subject, and conclusions to those of a 2013 paper from the journal Tropical Animal Health and Production, which was retracted because the authors “had no permission to use the data presented in the Table 1.”

We described that earlier retraction from TAHP, and the similarity with this most recently retracted paper, in a post from early last year.

Here is the LS retraction notice for “Nutritional evaluation of wheat straw treated with white-rot fungus Crinipellis sp. RCK-SC in Sahiwal calves”: Continue reading Food fight: Animal nutrition author disputes two retractions

Plagiarism identified in computer face recognition paper

A paper about computerized facial recognition has been pulled because “most of the contents of this article is plagiarized from an article under consideration elsewhere,” according to the retraction statement.

Applications of computer face recognition include surveillance and criminal identification. The authors propose a new method for picking out facial features in the original 2013 article, “Pose invariant face recognition using biological inspired features based on ensemble of classifiers.”

The retraction note offers few details on what went wrong. Here it is, in full:

Continue reading Plagiarism identified in computer face recognition paper