Nature is retracting a 2010 paper by a team from Princeton and Drexel on the workings of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria in people. How that came about seems to have been a winding road.
The article — a research letter — titled “Branched tricarboxylic acid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum,” came from the Princeton lab of Manuel Llinás. It purported to find that:
Continue reading Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper
Last month, we covered the retraction of a paper by A.M.K. El-Ghonemy, of Al-Jouf University in Saudi Arabia. The engineer now has a second retraction in the same journal, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
Here’s the notice for “Waste energy recovery in sea water reverse osmosis desalination plants, Part-1: Review”: Continue reading Saudi engineer loses second fresh water paper for plagiarism
A team of neuroscientists in Japan has lost their 2012 article in Brain Research for duplicating elements of a figure from a paper they’d published earlier that year in another journal.
The article, “Dynamic changes of mitochondrial fission proteins after transient cerebral ischemia in mice,” came from a lab at Okayama University. The last author was Koji Abe. According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Mitochondrial fission paper falls for fusing data from earlier work
Talanta, a journal serving the analytical chemistry community — we’d love to know how the name came to be — has retracted a 2013 article by a group of Indian researchers over an authorship dispute.
The paper, “Non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor based on silver/silver oxide nano-rods reinforced with multiwall carbon nanotubes,” appeared in January, with the authors listed as Leila Shahriary, Santosh K. Haram and Anjali A. Athawale.
But according to the retraction notice:
Continue reading “Conflicts among the authors” force retraction of Talanta paper
For the second time this month, Retraction Watch has been slapped with the threat of a lawsuit, this time Ariel Fernandez, whose work in BMC Genomics became the subject of a recent expression of concern.
Today, Fernandez emailed one of us (Adam) the following message:
Continue reading Retraction Watch threatened with legal action…again
The next several weeks are shaping up as busy ones for Retraction Watch, as we make appearances in three cities: Continue reading Come see Retraction Watch in Calgary, Fort Collins, Montreal, New York, and Seattle
Math journal editors can add — but they can also subtract.
That’s what happened to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (JMAA), “On the fractional Ostrowski inequality with uncertainty.”
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Oops: Math journal retracts paper accepted by “accidental administrative error”
A 2003 paper is now subject to an Expression of Concern after its author reused a lot of its material in a 2007 paper.
Here’s the Expression of Concern for “New therapeutic target in primary headaches – blocking the CGRP receptor” by Lars Edvinsson of the University of Copehagen: Continue reading Duplicate publication of headache paper earns Expression of Concern, erratum
A former researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis has won back the right to apply for Federal research funding despite a 2011 finding against him by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Philippe Bois, a cancer researcher now working at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida, argued that the alleged misconduct in the ORI findings — which led to a three-year ban on applying for funding — was actually honest error. As Bois’s attorneys explained last year: Continue reading Researcher found by ORI to have committed misconduct earns back right to apply for Federal grants
BMC Genomics has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper by a prominent Argentine chemist, Ariel Fernandez, whose work covers several disciplines — “His research spans representation theory in algebra, physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, and more recently, molecular evolution and drug discovery” — and institutions. And therein lies the tale.
Fernandez appeared as the first author of the article, titled “Subfunctionalization reduces the fitness cost of gene duplication in humans by buffering dosage imbalances,” along with a pair of researchers from Taiwan. Fernandez’s affiliations were listed as being with the Instituto Argentino de Matemática “Alberto P. Calderón”, CONICET (National Research Council of Argentina), in Buenos Aires, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the Morgridge Institute for Research, in Madison, Wisc.
According to the abstract:
Continue reading “Conflicting investigations” prompt expression of concern in BMC Genomics