Earlier this month, we reported on a correction by Luk van Parijs, the biologist the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fired in 2005 after he admitted to making up data.
Immunity has now run a retraction involving van Parijs, dated May 25, 2012, for 2003’s “Autoimmunity as the Consequence of a Spontaneous Mutation in Rasgrp1”: Continue reading An Immunity retraction for Luk van Parijs, three years after the ORI found evidence of fabrication in the paper
Improperly aligned columns have cost researchers at the Mayo Clinic a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The paper originally concluded that fainting spells (syncope) give patients with high blood pressure in their lung arteries poor prognoses, an observation that turned out to be incorrect.
The problem? The group merged two electronic databases, but did not align columns properly, a problem found only after first author Rachel Le revisited the dataset looking to cull more data.
The retraction notice published on May 22 (the one on ScienceDirect is free to air, while the one on the JACC site is behind a paywall): Continue reading Not for the faint of heart: Cardiologists retract syncope paper after realizing data columns weren’t aligned right
Last week, we brought you the story of Thong Duc Le and his colleagues, physicists who were forced to retract four papers, including one that cited, as we noted “their own study that had already been retracted for plagiarism.”
The team has now retracted three more papers: Continue reading Three more retractions for Vietnamese physicists who plagiarized a plagiarized paper
A group of French researchers liked their paper on the properties of molten tin so much they published it twice. In the same journal. Four months apart.
The article, “Nitrogen spray atomization of molten tin metal: Powder morphology characteristics,” first appeared online in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. That one has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
In May 2007, the same group, sans two authors, published a paper online in the JMPT (and in January 2008 in print) with the identical title. That article — which managed to get cited three times — has now been retracted: Continue reading Mighty molten powder researchers publish paper in journal twice, months apart
As we reported earlier this spring, the UK journal Anaesthesia published a remarkable statistical analysis of the work of Yoshitaka Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist who has been accused of fabricating his results for years — and who, we’re led to believe, may soon wind up with the record for retractions, at a number north of 190.
Fujii has responded to the journal with an equally startling (for different reasons, of course) rebuttal. We received permission from Steve Yentis, Anaesthesia‘s editor, to reprint the letter in its entirely. We present it here, and strongly recommend that readers take a look at the journal’s website to read the piece that prompted Fujii’s response: Continue reading Potential retraction record holder Fujii to Anaesthesia: I’m no stats expert, but my studies have “integrity”
A group of researchers at the University of Utah has retracted two papers from Cell Metabolism after they realized that a dismissed employee had tossed out data that were the basis of some error-laden figures.
Here’s the notice for both papers: Continue reading Authors retract two Cell Metabolism papers after “data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory”
Gerold Schuler, a German immunology researcher who shared the 2006 Deutscher Krebspreis — aka the German Cancer Prize — for his work that contributed to cancer vaccines has retracted a paper in International Immunology following concerns raised by a German science watchdog blog.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Leading cancer vaccines researcher retracts paper for figure “discrepancies” flagged by watchdog blog
The authors of a 2010 paper in the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery have retracted it after realizing that their colleagues at other institutions had already published a paper based on the same findings.
Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Authors retract 2010 Archives of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery paper because of duplication
In a case that is a good reminder of why journal editors shouldn’t ignore anonymous tips, a Seoul National University stem cell researcher has been forced to retract four papers, and withdraw another under peer review, in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling following a whistleblower’s exhaustive analysis.
Two retractions by Soo Kyung Kang, a professor of veterinary biotechnology at Seoul National University, appeared on May 9 after an anonymous whistleblower sent a 70-slide PowerPoint presentation to the editors of ten journals that contained evidence of suspicious floating error bars, errors larger than actual measurements, pasted-together lanes in PCR gels and RNA and CHIP blots and several cases where the same control blot data is shown across different experiments and in different papers. In all, the whistleblower raises questions about 14 papers in the ten journals.
Here is the May 9 notice for “Nuclear Ago2/HSP60 contributes to broad spectrum of hATSCs function via Oct4 regulation”: Continue reading Whistleblower forces retractions of four stem cell papers amid questions about more than a dozen studies
Last month, we (and others) reported that the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) had temporarily withdrawn a paper by a former president of the society after a number of chemists pointed out similarities between the March 25 article and previous ones by the author, Ronald Breslow.
The paper had drawn puzzled looks thanks to an April 11 press release — since deleted — headlined “Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?” In its note last month, the journal said: Continue reading JACS makes it official, retracting Breslow “space dinosaurs” paper for “similarity to his previously published reviews”