Duplication forces retraction of paper by group whose work is used to justify prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing

A dozen years might seem like a publishing eternity, but the European Journal of Cancer has decided to purge a duplicate paper from 2000. The article, on the utility of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for detecting prostate cancer, comes from a group whose work in this area has been widely cited as evidence for the benefits of the highly controversial screening tool.

“Prostate cancer screening in the Tyrol, Austria: experience and results,” by a group of Austrian researchers, has a rather complicated past. It’s been cited 42 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the notice, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal: Continue reading Duplication forces retraction of paper by group whose work is used to justify prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing

Coming clean: A major figure in cardiology publishes a lengthy conflict of interest correction in JAMA

Authors’ financial disclosures can be a thorny issue for scientific journals.  There’s often confusion over just what should be listed as a conflict of interest, and when relationships are revealed after papers are published, lack of disclosure sometimes leads to corrections.

For example, the Journal of Cell Science recently published this: Continue reading Coming clean: A major figure in cardiology publishes a lengthy conflict of interest correction in JAMA

Anesthesia journal editor says “if you blow us off, it will be retracted,” and sticks to his word

The Journal of Clinical Anesthesia has retracted a paper by a group of Israeli authors whose study may not have had appropriate ethical approval — or even collected the reported data.

The article, “Accidental venous and dural puncture during epidural analgesia in obese parturients (BMI > 40 kg/m2): three different body positions during insertion,” was published in 2010 by a team from Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, in Zerifin, one of the country’s largest hospitals and an affiliate of Tel Aviv University. Dural puncture is an infrequent but potentially serious complication of labor anesthesia, causing severe headaches and, in rare cases, death if untreated.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Anesthesia journal editor says “if you blow us off, it will be retracted,” and sticks to his word

Anil Potti and colleagues retract ninth paper, this one in JCO

Former Duke oncology researcher Anil Potti has retracted another paper, marking his ninth withdrawal. The notice in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) reads:

“An Integrated Genomic-Based Approach to Individualized Treatment of Patients With Advanced-Stage Ovarian Cancer” by Holly K. Dressman, Andrew Berchuck, Gina Chan, Jun Zhai, Andrea Bild, Robyn Sayer, Janiel Cragun, Jennifer Clarke, Regina S. Whitaker, LiHua Li, Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Marks, Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, Anil Potti, Mike West, Joseph R. Nevins, and Johnathan M. Lancaster (J Clin Oncol 25:517-525, 2007)

The majority of the authors wish to retract this article because Continue reading Anil Potti and colleagues retract ninth paper, this one in JCO

Editor who published Andrulis paper tries to explain how it happened

The editor of a new journal that published a paper that has been met with disbelief by many in the blogoshpere — and those are the polite reactions — has posted a narrative about how the paper came to appear in his journal. Retraction Watch readers may recall that Case Western, home to the paper’s author, Erik Andrulis, retracted its press release about the work. Several of the journal’s editorial board members have resigned over it.

Life’s editor, Shu-Kun Lin, writes that there was a switch in editors: Continue reading Editor who published Andrulis paper tries to explain how it happened

Plagiarism burns authors of fire safety paper

Safety science might not be the most crowded field, nor its eponymous journal the title on every marquee, but here’s a general rule for would-be plagiarists even in relatively obscure publications: Avoid lifting text from government reports and other publicly available references. (Well, don’t plagiarize at all, but you know what we mean.)

Consider: The journal Safety Science is retracting a 2011 paper whose authors evidently failed to adhere to that principle. Here’s the notice for the article, “Agent-based simulation of fire emergency evacuation with fire and human interaction model,” by Yang Peizhong, Wang Xin and Liu Tao, of Shanghai Jiaotong University: Continue reading Plagiarism burns authors of fire safety paper

Cell runs a lengthy correction, rather than retraction, for image problems

The journal Cell has an interesting — and somewhat puzzling — correction this month that we’ll add to our “mega-correction” file.

At issue is a paper, published in October, from the lab of Harvard’s Stephen Elledge, a noted genetics researcher, whose first author is a post-doc there named Michael Emanuele.

According to the notice, Emanuele (singled out, we note) seems to have been rather careless with the images used in the article, titled “Global Identification of Modular Cullin-RING Ligase Substrates”: Continue reading Cell runs a lengthy correction, rather than retraction, for image problems

Rabies paper retracted for plagiarism, and more from the Journal of Clinical Pathology

A cardinal (if oft-broken) rule of headline writing is to avoid the use of question marks. We think it’s particularly important to do so when the potential for ironic misadventure lurks.

To wit: The Journal of Clinical Pathology (JCP) has withdrawn/retracted a 2008 paper by a group of Indian authors (from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, at Deemed University) whose cliff-hanging title asks the question “Tracking the footprints of the rabies virus: are we any closer to decoding this elusive virus?” Continue reading Rabies paper retracted for plagiarism, and more from the Journal of Clinical Pathology

No small matter: ACS Nano journal growing alarmed by self-plagiarism

Is self-plagiarism — perhaps best referred to as duplication of your own work — a big problem in nanotechnology research?

The American Chemical Society (ACS) Nano journal retracted a study, “Retraction of Nanoembossing Induced Ferroelectric Lithography on PZT Films for Silver Particle Patterning,”  late last month because of such duplication:

This article was withdrawn at the request of the Editor-in-Chief, with agreement by the authors, due to unacceptable redundant text and figures with a previously published article by the same authors (Langmuir 2011, 27, 5167-5170. DOI: 10.1021/la200377b).

This wasn’t the first such retraction for the journal. In May, they retracted “Conductance Preservation of Carbene-Functionalized Metallic Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes for the same reason:” Continue reading No small matter: ACS Nano journal growing alarmed by self-plagiarism

MD Anderson investigating researcher Bharat Aggarwal over images

Bharat Aggarwal, an influential MD Anderson researcher who has been accused in the blogosphere of manipulating images in a slew of published studies, acknowledged to Retraction Watch that the Houston institution is investigating the matter. Reached by Retraction Watch by phone at his office, Aggarwal said MD Anderson

has been looking into it and I think that they will tell everybody what it is all about. I think that somebody out there is putting this whole thing together and their mind is made up.

However, Aggarwal, chief of the center’s cytokine research section, denied that any retractions of his papers were forthcoming. He refused to comment on whether officials had confiscated his computer, as a commenter to this blog has claimed. Continue reading MD Anderson investigating researcher Bharat Aggarwal over images