Oh, snap: Cable wakeboarding injury paper falls to duplication

A team of what you might call daredevil researchers has lost a paper about a sport called cable wakeboarding after they tried to publish, in English, a very similar version of what they’d published in German.

We have a confession to make: Before sitting down to write this post, we had no idea what cable wakeboarding was. So before we discuss the retraction, here’s a definition, courtesy of CableWakeboarding.com:

Cable wakeboarding is simply wakeboarding while being pulled not by a boat, but by an overhead cableski system. It’s definitely the coolest addition to the distinguished list of extreme sports throughout the world, because it combines the best of the extreme nature of wakeboarding without the need for (or expense of) a boat. Cable is an enormously valuable and important element of the entire sport of wakeboarding.

Now to the retraction notice for “Cable wakeboarding, a new trendy sport: analysis of injuries with regard to injury prevention,” published online in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports online in 2010: Continue reading Oh, snap: Cable wakeboarding injury paper falls to duplication

A correction for Alirio Melendez, in Journal of Cellular Physiology

We’ve been covering the case of Alirio Melendez, three of whose papers have been retracted amidst questions about almost 70 studies. The latest development is a correction in the Journal of Cellular Physiology, which has already retracted one of his papers, of a study on which he was a co-author.

Here’s the correction for “Short dysfunctional telomeres impair the repair of arsenite-induced oxidative damage in mouse cells”: Continue reading A correction for Alirio Melendez, in Journal of Cellular Physiology

University of Nebraska investigating work of lung researchers as journal issues Expression of Concern

The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM) has issued an Expression of Concern about a paper published online earlier this year, after concerns about the data prompted an investigation by the University of Nebraska.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading University of Nebraska investigating work of lung researchers as journal issues Expression of Concern

Dental paper pulled for “unattributed overlap”

The Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B: Applied Biomaterials is retracting a 2010 paper by Turkish dental researchers for “unattributed overlap.”

We’re pretty sure that’s a euphemism for plagiarism we haven’t heard before — and it raises the question, could you have acceptable, attributed overlap?

The study has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including by the retraction notice: Continue reading Dental paper pulled for “unattributed overlap”

Cardiff University looking into allegations of misconduct by group headed by its dean of medicine

Last December, we reported on a Journal of Immunology paper that was retracted after a Cardiff University investigation found the senior author had inappropriately manipulated images.  The inquiry found that there had been “no intention to mislead and subsequent repeats of the original experiments have shown that the paper’s conclusions remain sound,” the university told us at that time.

The senior author of the paper, Rossen Donev, had since moved on to the University of Swansea, and Cardiff had notified the Medical Research Council, which funded the work. The case seemed to end there.

But other work by Donev’s former lab group, which is led by BP Morgan, the dean of Cardiff’s medical school, has been the subject of scrutiny by at least one anonymous whistleblower. That whistleblower’s allegations — which also center on image manipulation — have been reported on the relatively new site Science Fraud, which posts allegations anonymously. They involve papers published in Cancer Research, Molecular Immunology, and the American Journal of Physiology.

We’ve now learned that Cardiff has “initiated its Procedure for Dealing with Allegations of Academic Misconduct in Research” after Clare Francis, another anonymous whistleblower whose name will probably be familiar to Retraction Watch readers, forwarded the concerns to university officials. Now, according to an email from Carole A Evans, Cardiff’s Director of Governance and Compliance Division: Continue reading Cardiff University looking into allegations of misconduct by group headed by its dean of medicine

Happy second anniversary, Retraction Watch: Plus, our plans for year three

We didn’t plan it this way, but our second anniversary gift came a few days early this week, when we learned that a retraction notice had cited us. Given that the traditional second anniversary gift is cotton, and we’re really not sure what to do with that information, we’re much happier — and humbled — by the mention.

Two years ago today, we launched Retraction Watch. When we looked back at year one, we had written more than 250 posts; that number is up to more than 600. We had a new record-holder in our first year, Joachim Boldt, with 88 retractions; we now have a new one, Yoshitaka Fujii, with 172 likely. This July, we crossed the three million-pageview threshold, and also saw our first 300,000-pageview month.

But numbers don’t always tell the whole story, Continue reading Happy second anniversary, Retraction Watch: Plus, our plans for year three

Family Practice affair: Diabetes paper pulled for redundancy, which journal calls “honest error”

Family Practice has retracted a 2009 review article on diabetes whose author had published a similar — in spots identical — paper two years earlier in another journal. We think the notice is nine-tenths solid, but there’s a part at the end that raises an important question about how much, or little, editors should do to accommodate the embarrassments of their authors.

The notice:

Continue reading Family Practice affair: Diabetes paper pulled for redundancy, which journal calls “honest error”

Transparency in action: EMBO Journal detects manipulated images, then has them corrected before publishing

As Retraction Watch readers know, we’re big fans of transparency. Today, for example, The Scientist published an opinion piece we wrote calling for a Transparency Index for journals. So perhaps it’s no surprise that we’re also big fans of open peer review, in which all of a papers’ reviews are made available to readers once a study is published.

Not that many journals have taken this step — medical journals at BioMedCentral are among those that have, and they even include the names of reviewers — but a recent peer review file from EMBO Journal, one publication that has embraced this transparent approach, is particularly illuminating.

Alan G. Hinnebusch, of the U.S. Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, submitted a paper on behalf of his co-authors on November 2, 2011, at which point it went out for peer review. The editors sent those reviews back to the author on January 2, 2012, and Hinnebusch responded with revisions on April 4. So far, the process looks much like that any scientist goes through — questions about methods, presentation, and conclusions, followed by answers from the authors.

But what caught the eye of frequent Retraction Watch commenter Dave, who brought this to our attention, was what happened starting on May 18 when the editors responded to the authors again. (That letter is labeled as page 6, but is actually page 16 of the linked document.): Continue reading Transparency in action: EMBO Journal detects manipulated images, then has them corrected before publishing

Psychological Science retracts a Sanna paper, citing lawyers, COPE…and Retraction Watch

In April 2011, we praised Psychological Science for its handling of a retraction. At the time, we went as far as to call the retraction notice a “model” of transparency for other journals to follow.

Well, they evidently took that compliment seriously, according to a new retraction notice for a paper by Lawrence Sanna. Sanna left Michigan under a cloud a few months ago after another scientist found his data statistically implausible, as Ed Yong reported in Nature.

The newly retracted paper, “Construing collective concerns: Increasing cooperation by broadening construals in social dilemmas,” was published in 2009 while Sanna was still at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Here’s a sample from the abstract: Continue reading Psychological Science retracts a Sanna paper, citing lawyers, COPE…and Retraction Watch

Cancer journal pulls deeply flawed meeting abstract on breast surgery

The European Journal of Surgical Oncology has retracted a meeting abstract that evidently was never meant to be.

The study, by researchers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Good Hope Hospital, both in Birmingham, England, was to be presented at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of Breast Surgery and purported to compare rates of patient satisfaction among women who underwent two kinds of breast reconstruction, TRAM — transverse rectus abdominis myocutaneous  — flap and DIEP (short for deep inferior epigastric perforators) flap.

But according to the notice: Continue reading Cancer journal pulls deeply flawed meeting abstract on breast surgery