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.
Last month, the community was shaken when a major study on gay marriage in Science was retracted following questions on its funding, data, and methodology.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.
C. K. Gunsalus
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 Timesquoted 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.”
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 Naturepaper, “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.
(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.”
The authors of recent article about the rabbit hepatitis E virus have pulled the paper after discovering an unexpected mutation in their viral clone that likely affected the analysis.
They realized their mistake soon after the article, “RNA transcripts of full-length cDNA clones of rabbit hepatitis E virus are infectious in rabbits,” was published online in the Journal of General Virology in November, 2014. They withdrew the article before it made it into print.
The article came from a group led by Xiang-Jin Meng, of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, an offshoot of Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland.
Here at Retraction Watch, we are reminded every day that everybody (including us) makes mistakes — what matters is, how you handle yourself when it happens. That’s why we created a “doing the right thing” category, to flag incidents where scientists have owned up to their errors and taken steps to correct them.
We’re not suggesting retractions have no effect on a scientist’s career — a working paper posted last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that principal investigators with retracted papers see an average drop of 10% in citations of their other papers, a phenomenon known as a citation penalty. But they face a bigger penalty if the retraction stemmed from misconduct, rather than an honest mistake.
Genome Biology has partially retracted a high-profile paper about an epigenetic biomarker of aging – a year and a half after the author alerted the journal to a software coding error that invalidated one of its findings.
The American Journal of Pathology has posted a note of concern to a 2002 paper about retinoblastoma after discovering two sets of figures “share significant overlap… suggesting that they did not originate from different specimens.”
The overlap was “simultaneously brought to the attention of the Editors” by both the corresponding author and a “concerned reader.”
The paper examined the role of a transcription factor called NF-kappaB in driving retinoblastoma, and suggested that inhibiting the molecule’s activity could be a therapeutic strategy.
The authors attribute the overlap to “an inadvertent misidentification of the original files at the stage of image capture.” They add that they “sincerely regret this inadvertent error;” because other data in the paper show “concordant results,” they stand by the paper’s findings.
An economist in Taiwan has retracted a paper about from Economic Development Quarterly because it was “published in error.”
