Last spring, we reported on the retraction in Clinical and Translational Allergy of a 2011 paper by researchers in Egypt and Finland after “severe problems in the data set” were uncovered. The notice cited an earlier study, from 2009, in Acta Paediatrica, that formed the basis for the subsequent trial.
At the time, the Acta Paediatrica paper still stood. No longer: Continue reading Allergy researchers lose second paper over “severe problems” with data
We’re not sure how many you need for a “slew,” but we’ve seen five retractions in Neuroscience Letters recently, most of them because researchers republished translations of papers in English, so we thought we’d round them up in a post.
We’ll start the count — appropriately, we think — with the notice for “Simple mental arithmetic is not so simple: An ERP study of the split and odd–even effects in mental arithmetic“, published in February by researchers from Nanjing Normal University in China: Continue reading Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters
Diederik Stapel’s CV continues to crumble, with five more retractions for the disgraced Dutch social scientist who admitted to fabricating data in his studies.
The latest articles to fall appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a Sage title, bringing Stapel’s total to 25 that we’re aware of so far: Continue reading A fistful of Stapels: Psych journal retracts five more from Dutch researcher, upping total to 25
Less than 24 hours after the publication of a study showing no link between XMRV, aka xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), the authors of a a study claiming a link between the virus and prostate cancer have has been retractedit. The move comes along with the publication of a new study showing that no such link exists.
Here’s the notice, from PLoS Pathogens: Continue reading Another XMRV shoe drops: PLoS Pathogens study linking prostate cancer to virus retracted
The journal Feminist Legal Studies has retracted a paper by a controversial Canadian scholar, Sunera Thobani, after the researcher evidently disagreed with post-acceptance edits.
Thobani, of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, became a figure of some international repute for statements in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks that were highly critical of the United States and its response to the assaults and of the West in general: Continue reading Feminist studies journal retracts paper after post-acceptance editing dispute
Could this really — and finally — be the end for the alleged link between XMRV, also known as xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus, to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)?
The title of the press release announcing a long-awaited study of the subject in mBio is blunt: “Viruses not to blame for chronic fatigue syndrome after all.” A quote in the release from Ian Lipkin, who led the study, is even more direct: Continue reading New study “puts…speculation to rest” about link between XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome
There have been a number of thoughtful stories and opinion pieces on scientific fraud recently. There was Brian Deer in the Sunday Times of London last month. Paul Jump, at the Times Higher Education, later that month looked at the lessons of one particular case. Alok Jha, of the Guardian, took on the issue last week.
Yesterday, in a Knight Science Journalism Tracker post on a symposium on communicating science with integrity, Deborah Blum suggested science writers “need to be increasingly aware – and wary – of these issues in academic publishing,” while noting that they are a “minority report.” (And thanks to all of those pieces for the mentions and kind words about Retraction Watch.)
Some scientists, of course, agree, if the steady deluge of tips we get from working researchers is any indication. “We must be open about our mistakes,” wrote Jim Woodgett, of the Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, in Nature earlier this month.
But not everyone thinks highlighting misconduct is such a good idea, Continue reading Does focusing on wrongdoing in research feed mistrust of science?
Hyung-In Moon, the South Korean plant compound researcher who made up email addresses so he could do his own peer review, is now up to 35 retractions.
The four new retractions are of the papers in the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry that initially led to suspicions when all the reviews came back within 24 hours. Here’s the notice, which includes the same language as Moon’s 24 other retractions of studies published in Informa Healthcare journals: Continue reading Retraction count grows to 35 for scientist who faked emails to do his own peer review
The authors of a paper suggesting that cassava, a starchy vegetable that’s a major food source in much of the developing world, could one day be turned into a food staple “capable of supplying inexpensive, plant-based proteins for food, feed and industrial applications” have retracted it, following an institutional investigation that failed to find critical supporting data.
Here’s the notice for the PLoS ONE study, “Transgenic Biofortification of the Starchy Staple Cassava (Manihot esculenta) Generates a Novel Sink for Protein:” Continue reading PLoS ONE GMO cassava paper retracted after data “could not be found”
Eighteen years ago, the Journal of Dermatology published an article, “A sulfated proteoglycan as a novel ligand for CD44,” by a group of Japanese researchers (the journal is the official periodical of the Japanese Dermatological Society).
The JoD is now retracting that paper because it overlaps with another article by the same group, published a few months earlier in a different journal.
Here’s the notice (behind a pay wall — tsk, tsk, Wiley): Continue reading Eighteen years later, derm journal retracts overlapping article, citing editorial error