A group of researchers at Stanford and elsewhere is retracting a 2013 paper that another scientist told Nature was “one of the biggest things to happen in the narcolepsy field for some time.”
The Science Translational Medicine paper caused a buzz because it claimed to show that narcolepsy was an autoimmune disease. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Authors retract paper “confirming” that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease
Fred Walumbwa, the leadership researcher at Florida International University who has retracted six papers for what appear to be problematic data, now has an impressive mega-correction in the form of an “addendum.”
The paper, “Relationships between Authentic Leadership, Moral Courage, and Ethical and Pro-Social Behaviors,” was published in Business Ethics Quarterly in October 2011, by Walumbwa and two colleagues, Sean Hannah and Bruce Avolio.
Here’s the abstract for the paper, which has been cited 18 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:
A 2012 expression of concern prompted by an authorship dispute has been upgraded to a retraction.
As we reported in 2012, Revista Brasiliera de Reumatologia (aka the Brazilian Journal of Rheumatology) issued an expression of concern about “Anticitrullinated peptide antibodies and rheumatoid factor in Sudanese patients with Leishmania donovani infection” after
a claim from one of the authors, questioning the authorship of the corresponding author, and informed that the article was under submission to another journal.
The journal sought the advice of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and continued its investigation. That investigation is apparently now complete, and this retraction notice is the result: Continue reading Bitter rheumatology authorship dispute ends in retraction
The title of this post isn’t exactly how the one-sided conversation between the editors of Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment and a group of researchers went. But it seems likely it was pretty close.
Here’s an expression of concern for “A cross-sectional study on perception of stigma by Chinese schizophrenia patients:” Continue reading “Authors, please call us. Pretty please? OK, we’re going to retract your paper!”
“How many and which ant species are being accidentally moved around the world?,” published in 2013, has been retracted because the authors “used a wrong list of species and omitted to include a reference.”
The authors claim that this affected the magnitude of the issue, but not the overall conclusion.
The paper was written up by the press several times, including by the BBC, though according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, it hasn’t been cited.
Here is the notice: Continue reading Who moved my ants? Species confusion sinks paper on invasive species
An expression of concern has been issued for the second of three papers on the idea that, if you have three positive emotions for every negative one, you will be more successful in life.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has spent the last decade building a brand around this ratio, initially described by a mathematical equation based on fluid dynamics by mathematician Marcial Losada. You can read our coverage of the debunking of that equation, presented in a 1999 paper that has been cited nearly 1,700 times, here.
Nick Brown, co-author with Alan Sokal on the paper that discredited the Losada equation, has written a blog post on the current state of affairs. He also got in touch with us regarding the expression of concern for a 2004 article in American Behavioral Scientist that he had also questioned, “The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams: A Nonlinear Dynamic Model”: Continue reading “Positivity ratio” research now subject to an expression of concern
The Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned a former researcher in the lab of Linda Buck, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for falsifying data in two papers written with the support of grants from the National Institutes of Health.
The researcher, Zou Zhihua, worked with Buck as a post-doc at Harvard and then at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, Buck’s current home. After leaving there in 2005, he spent three years at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and now appears to be a faculty member at Jilin University in China.
According to the report:
Continue reading ORI sanctions collaborator of Nobel winner Buck for data fabrication
A University of Calgary diabetes researcher, Cory Toth, who told us earlier this year that he would cease publishing in the scientific literature, has two more retractions, making seven.
Both appear in Neurobiology of Disease. Here’s the notice for “Differential impact of diabetes and hypertension in the brain: Adverse effects in white matter:”
Continue reading Diabetes researcher Cory Toth up to seven retractions
Sometimes, retractions seem to have a juicy back story, but the explanation proves tantalizingly out of reach.
Such is the case for a law review retraction on a paper about reparations for human rights violations. After someone complained that author Gentian Zyberi “had not done sufficient justice to the substantial contribution” they made, the complainant refused both a co-author credit and a rewrite of the passages in question, insisting instead on a full retraction.
Here’s the notice for “The International Court of Justice and applied forms of reparation for international human rights and humanitarian law violations”: Continue reading Law review paper yanked for lack of attribution despite offer of co-authorship
Another busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Science News cites The Onion, bitterness over lack of credit in sixth grader’s project
