A group of physicists has retracted their preliminary report in the GCN Circular of a massive star-sized explosion after deciding that what they’d really observed was another phenomenon.
Although we could try to explain this, we’d rather leave it up to Giacomo Vianello, an experimental physicist at Stanford University, who was a member of the research team.
Vianello told us: Continue reading Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder where you went: Astronomy report retracted
Earlier this month, we brought you the story of a retraction from the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology involving rivalry and alleged sock puppetry. The author of the now-retracted letter, physicist Lorenzo Iorio, claimed that another researcher was using fake names to criticize his work on arXiv.At the time, the editor of the journal had told everyone concerned that the letter would be retracted, but the retraction notice hadn’t yet appeared. Now it has.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction of letter alleging sock puppetry now cites “legal reasons”
One of the complaints we often hear about the self-correcting nature of science is that authors and editors seem very reluctant to retract papers with obvious fatal flaws. Indeed, it seems fairly clear that the number of papers retracted is smaller than the number of those that should be.
To try to get a sense of how errors are corrected in the literature, Arturo Casadevall, Grant Steen, and Ferric Fang, whose work on retractions will be familiar to our readers, in a new paper in the FASEB Journal, look at the sources of error in papers retracted for reasons other than misconduct.
Here’s the abstract (emphasis ours): Continue reading “Barriers to retraction may impede correction of the literature:” New study
The pixels were barely dry on our post reporting the 14th and 15th retractions for management professor Ulrich Lichtenthaler Friday by the time his 16th retraction appeared.
Here’s the notice for “The role of deliberate and experiential learning in developing capabilities: Insights from technology licensing,” a paper originally published in 2012 in the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management: Continue reading Ulrich Lichtenthaler retraction count rises to 16
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, which kicked off with an introduction to our first-ever intern. This coming week, Ivan will be in Zwettl, Lower Austria, speaking at the Vienna Biocenter PhD retreat, and in London, speaking at the UK Conference of Science Journalists. Here’s what’s been happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: MERS case report clash, criticizing others’ work in public
Pfizer has retracted another study involving an experimental cancer drug that later failed later-stage trials.
The study, published in Clinical Cancer Research in 2010, looked at which patients might respond to the drug, called figitumumab. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Pfizer retracts another experimental cancer drug study
It’s time to review the reviews.
That’s the central message of a new paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution , “Errors in science: The role of reviewers,” by Tamás Székely, Oliver Krüger, and E. Tobias Krause. The authors
propose that the process of manuscript reviewing needs to be evaluated and improved by the scientific publishing community.
We certainly agree in principle, and have suggested a Transparency Index that has some of the same goals. We asked Adam Etkin, who founded Peer Review Evaluation (PRE) “to assist members of the scholarly publishing community who are committed to preserving an ethical, rigorous peer review process,” what he thought. PRE has created PRE-val and PRE-score to “validate what level of peer review was conducted prior to the publication of scholarly works.” Etkin told us: Continue reading Is it time for a journal Review Quality Index?
Ulrich Lichtenthaler, of the University of Mannheim, has notched retractions 14 and 15, both in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.
Here’s the notice for “Technological Turbulence and the Impact of Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Organizations on Product Development Performance:” Continue reading Management prof Lichtenthaler up to 15 retractions
Oncology Reviews has retracted a 2014 paper on breast cancer after learning that the authors lifted parts of it from a continuing medical education lesson on Medscape.
The paper, “Challenges of combined everolimus/endocrine therapy in hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer,” was written by Yousif Abubakr, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and Yasar Albushra, of King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, in Saudi Arabia.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Authors plagiarize CME cancer article, lose their review paper
The authors of a Current Biology paper published online in February of this year have retracted it after voluminous criticism on post-publication review site PubPeer and a university committee found evidence of figure manipulation.
The paper, “Agonist-Induced GPCR Shedding from the Ciliary Surface Is Dependent on ESCRT-III and VPS4,” was co-authored by Hua Jin and Livana Soetedjo, a graduate student in Jin’s lab. Soetedjo was first author, and Jin was corresponding author.
The comments at PubPeer began on March 24: Continue reading Authors retract Current Biology study following criticism on PubPeer and university investigation