The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology has retracted two articles by Diederik Stapel, the Dutch researcher who has admitted falsifying his data. Stapel was suspended from his post at Tilburg University in September.
Here are the notices, which appear together: Continue reading Journal retracts two Stapel papers, on salesmen and on women who change their names when they marry
Cytokine had an interesting retraction notice this year that points up the pitfalls — perhaps necessary, perhaps not — that journals can step in when they give authors the benefit of the doubt.
Here’s the story: A doctoral student named Varun Kesherwani was working in the lab of Ajit Sodhi, a U.S.-trained and well-published cell biologist at Banaras Hindu University. Kesherwani’s Linkedin page lists him as a postdoc at the University of Nebraska.
The two were co-authors on a 2007 paper in Cytokine, “Quantitative role of p42/44 and p38 in the production and regulation of cytokines TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-12 by murine peritoneal macrophages in vitro by Concanavalin A.” (That paper has been cited nine times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including by the retraction notice.)
But it seems Kesherwani, who was listed as the paper’s corresponding author despite his junior status, did not have his mentor’s blessing when he submitted the manuscript. Continue reading Authors’ public dispute over retraction notice in Cytokine ends in a draw, bruises journal
The authors of three papers in Rheumatology International about systemic sclerosis, also known as scleroderma, are retracting them after patients were misidentified in databases. According to the three notices:
This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. The authors made a serious statistical error which unfortunately invalidates their results.
Corresponding author Metin Isik tells Retraction Watch that the error was adding a patient with systemic sclerosis database twice, and adding another patient with polymyositis, not systemic sclerosis, to the sclerosis database. (Why the journal didn’t spell that out in the notice is anyone’s guess, but we’ve asked the editor for comment and will update with anything we hear back.)
It’s easy to see how three patients would affect the results of “Systemic sclerosis and malignancies after cyclophosphamide therapy: a single center experience,” Continue reading Patient database errors lead to three rheumatology retractions
The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has an informative retraction notice about a recent paper it published that was marred by self-plagiarism. The article, “Current concepts of surveillance and its significance in head and neck cancer,” from a group of researchers at Grant Medical College, in Mumbai (which is known to this blog) and Royal Marsden Hospital in London, appeared last November. It soon was found to be awfully similar to a 2009 article by the same group of authors (sort of) in a different journal.
Here’s what the Annals had to say: Continue reading Surgery journal retracts cancer paper for duplication after “naive” response from authors
Retraction Watch readers who’ve read Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks may remember that decades ago, scientists began realizing that Lacks’s cells, now known as the HeLa cell line and used in labs around the world, were so good at proliferating that they had taken over many other cell lines researchers use to study human disease.
Such readers would have been nodding their heads at a front-page Wall Street Journal on Saturday. As Amy Dockser Marcus (no relation to Adam) reports: Continue reading The HeLa problem: What a retraction says about whether cancer researchers can trust their cell lines
On Wednesday, the American Heart Association announced something that those of us who’d been reading the medical literature carefully had known for a while: Bad gums do not cause heart disease.
Periodontitis is linked to bad heart disease, you see, as studies have shown, and periodontists have sure been using this as an excuse to tell us to floss. But there’s never been a convincing study showing that one causes the other.
In fact, it’s not even clear how you’d do that study. “Let’s see, for a control group, we should have 100 people convince themselves they’re flossing for a year, but not actually floss….oh, what else can we get funding for?”
That “news” prompted an email from Retraction Watch friend Marc Abrahams, Continue reading A retracted periodontitis-heart disease paper that didn’t make it into the new AHA review
A group of cancer researchers from Tunisia has been seeding the oncology literature with plagiarized articles that steal liberally — both text and data — from the work of others.
The group has one retraction, in the journal Obesity — whose splash page has the jaunty, if disconcerting, invite: “Welcome to Obesity!” — and at least two withdrawn papers. However, we have been alerted to at least one other case of apparent plagiarism involving an article in the Annals of Saudi Medicine that ought to receive careful scrutiny. Continue reading Whistling the same Tunisia: Serial plagiarists plague the oncology literature
The Journal of Neurochemistry has retracted a 2008 paper, “Toll-like receptor 3 contributes to spinal glial activation and tactile allodynia after nerve injury,” it had initially corrected — and how.
The correction, which appeared online in August 2010, was extensive: Continue reading Neurochemistry journal retracts paper after earlier mega-correction for an author who’s no stranger to errata
Larry Husten at CardioBrief has an update on the case of Don Poldermans, a leading Dutch cardiologist who was accused of various iterations of research misconduct. Poldermans was fired last November by Erasmus Medical Center, where he had been head of perioperative cardiac care before the scandal.
According to Husten, Jeroen Bax, another prominent Dutch cardiologist with strong ties to Poldermans, has been cleared of wrongdoing by his institution, Leiden University Medical Centre: Continue reading Poldermans update: Magazine cites lack of informed consent, bogus patient surveys, invented data and more
Have a seat, this one’s a howler.
According to a retraction notice for “Computer application in mathematics,” published in Computers & Mathematics with Applications: Continue reading Math paper retracted because it “contains no scientific content”