Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study

October, apparently, is “studies of retractions month.” First there was a groundbreaking study in PNAS, then an NBER working paper, and yesterday PLoS Medicine alerted us to a paper their sister journal, PLoS ONE, published last week, “A Comprehensive Survey of Retracted Articles from the Scholarly Literature.”

The study, by Michael L. Grieneisen and Minghua Zhang, is comprehensive indeed, reaching further back into the literature than others we’ve seen, and also including more disciplines: Continue reading Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study

Collateral damage: What effect do retractions have on scientific funding?

Photo by Howard Lake via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/howardlake/

A new study from a group of Boston-area economists sheds some light on whether retractions have downstream effects on related fields, particularly when it comes to funding. From the abstract of the working paper, called simply “Retractions,” by  Pierre Azoulay, Jeffrey L. Furman, Joshua L. Krieger, and Fiona E. Murray:

We find that scientifi c misconduct stifle scientists’ pursuit of specifi c research lines, as we would anticipate if retraction events provide new signals of the fidelity of scienti fic knowledge. More centrally, our findings show that Continue reading Collateral damage: What effect do retractions have on scientific funding?

ORI investigating University of Florida ob-gyn researcher accused of misconduct

A prominent researcher at the University of Florida is under federal investigation for research misconduct and has lost at least one paper as a result of the fraud.

The researcher, Nasser Chegini, was a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the U of Florida until about six months ago, when he retired, according to the chair’s office. Nasser has received at least $4 million in federal grant funding, according to the university.

The retracted paper, “MicroRNA 21: response to hormonal therapies and regulatory function in leiomyoma, transformed leiomyoma and leiomyosarcoma cells,” was published in 2010 by Molecular Human Reproduction. The authors were Qun Pan and Xiaoping Luo and Chegini.

As the notice explains: Continue reading ORI investigating University of Florida ob-gyn researcher accused of misconduct

Authors dispute ethical lapse in case of double physics publication that wasn’t

Plasma Processes and Polymers has retracted a paper it published in March 2012 for what it describes as a “possible breach of ethics.”

That certainly sounds bad — if inconclusive — but the authors maintain the whole thing was a simple misunderstanding.

The article, “Plasma Acid: Water Treated by Dielectric Barrier Discharge,” came from the lab of Gary Friedman, a physicist at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The first, and corresponding, author was Natalie Shainsky, an award-winning graduate student at the school.

As the notice states: Continue reading Authors dispute ethical lapse in case of double physics publication that wasn’t

Bitter authorship issues prompt Expression of Concern in rheumatology journal

A difficult authorship dispute, involving two journals and at least two continents, has led to an Expression of Concern in the Brazilian Journal of Rheumatology.

Here’s the Expression of Concern: Continue reading Bitter authorship issues prompt Expression of Concern in rheumatology journal

Jumbled analysis leads to retraction of cancer study — but also another paper

The authors of a study on cancer incidence and survival in the Dutch migrant community have retracted it after realizing they’d made some errors that significantly affected the results.

But in what seems like an appropriate reward for coming forward, the newly analyzed data, with additional information, will be part of a forthcoming paper in another journal by the same authors.

The original retrospective study came out in May 2011 in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention and found that risk and survival of breast and stomach cancers differed depending on the person’s mother country. The problem was that the study jumbled up many of the participants’ homelands during the analysis.

The authors issued the following retraction: Continue reading Jumbled analysis leads to retraction of cancer study — but also another paper

Psychological Science in the news again: CNN retracts story on hormone-voting link

It’s not often that wade into retractions in the mainstream media on this blog, but in this case, we’ll make an exception.

As Politico and Poynter — and probably others — have reported, CNN has retracted a story about a yet-to-be-published study in Psychological Science claiming to find a link between estrogen and elections (disclosure: Ivan’s wife works at CNN). Specifically, the researchers reported that the well-documented preference among single women for President Obama might be rooted in their sex hormones, while that of married women for Mitt Romney seems to reflect their own ovulatory cycle. Or something like that.

Here’s the money part of the piece, which can still be found floating around on the web: Continue reading Psychological Science in the news again: CNN retracts story on hormone-voting link

HIV paper retracted after authors recommend a colleague as a reviewer

Nothing like a little home cooking.

Genetic Vaccines and Therapy (GVT) has retracted a paper by a group of Pakistani authors who recommended one of their colleagues as a reviewer for their manuscript.

That’s not all: According to the journal, the researchers apparently also misappropriated data from a previous study.

The article in question, “Structure based sequence analysis & epitope prediction of gp41 HIV1 envelope glycoprotein isolated in Pakistan,” was published in June 2012. The first author is  Syyada Samra Jafri, who we see as being at the University of the Punjab in Lahore. According to the retraction notice: Continue reading HIV paper retracted after authors recommend a colleague as a reviewer

Another odd retraction for alcohol researcher, this time for lack of animal research committee approval

The journal Neuroscience has retracted a 2011 paper by an alcohol researcher from the United Arab Emirates, who apparently conducted some mouse studies without the blessing of his institution’s animal ethics officials. At least, that’s what the retraction notice would have us believe.

The paper in question, “The pre-synaptic metabotropic glutamate receptor 7 “mGluR7” is a critical modulator of ethanol sensitivity in mice,” by Amine Bahi, was published in December 2011 and cited three times (twice by the author), according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. But as the notice explains:

Continue reading Another odd retraction for alcohol researcher, this time for lack of animal research committee approval

And the winner for longest time on record between publication and retraction is…

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We’ve had a few unofficial record-holders here at Retraction Watch. The current leader in the retraction column, for example, is Yoshitaka Fujii, who will likely retract 172 papers. He took that record from Joachim Boldt, with just shy of 90.

Today, we’ll take a stab at another record, longest time between publication and retraction. The apparent record holders, at 25 years, are I.E. Swift and V. E. Milborrow, who were at the University of New South Wales in Australia when they published “Retention of the 4-pro-R hydrogen atom of mevalonate at C-2,2′ of bacterioruberin in Halobacterium halobium” in the Biochemical Journal in 1980. Here’s the retraction notice from 2005 (hat tip Jeffrey Furman and colleagues, who noted the retraction in a paper earlier this year): Continue reading And the winner for longest time on record between publication and retraction is…