There’s another non-unanimous retraction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week, and this one involves an anti-tumor antibody that may not be what the authors originally thought it was.
The authors of a study allegedly showing that antidepressants prevent suicide have retracted it over unspecified errors. Here’s the notice:
At the request of the authors and in agreement with the Editor-in-Chief and Wiley-Blackwell, the following article “Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression”. Acta Psychiatr Scand 2010;122:454–460 has been retracted. The retraction has been requested and agreed due to unintentional errors in the analysis of the data presented.
“This American Life,” the popular radio show hosted by Ira Glass, is retracting an episode in which monologist Mike Daisey claimed to have described conditions in a Chinese factory that makes electronic devices, including Apple products. According to a note about this week’s episode:
Regrettably, we have discovered that one of our most popular episodes was partially fabricated. This week, we devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” Mike Daisey’s story about visiting Foxconn, an Apple supplier factory in China. Rob Schmitz, a reporter for Marketplace, raises doubts on much of Daisey’s story.
Ira also talks with Mike Daisey about why he misled This American Life during the fact-checking process. And we end the show separating fact from fiction, when it comes to Apple’s manufacturing practices in China.
A This American Life press release spells out why the show retracted the segment, and it isn’t pretty. The doubts started with Rob Schmitz, who interviewed Daisey’s Chinese interpreter, Li Guifen. (She goes by Cathy Lee professionally with Westerners, according to the release.) A lot of what Daisey had attributed to Lee was false, she said. And that came on top of the fact that Daisey had told This American Life fact-checkers that Lee’s name was Anna, and that he didn’t have a way to reach her anymore. Glass is quoted in the press release: Continue reading Watch and learn, science journals: “This American Life” retracts Mike Daisey segment on Apple in China
A group of authors has retracted a 2009 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after subsequent experiments suggested their original results weren’t holding up.
The journal Breast Cancer: Targets and Therapy, a Dove Medical Press title, has retracted four articles from a group of Indian researchers over what it said were “unacceptable levels” of duplication with other published work. (Such a construction leaves us wondering what might constitute “acceptable levels” of duplication, but that’s for a different post.)
Alzheimer’s & Dementia has retracted a meeting abstract the journal published without the OK of the researchers, a top group from Harvard, who submitted it but withdrew the work before the conference.
That, as they say, might require some unpacking. Maybe this will make things clearer.
The Spanish press has picked up on the story of a prominent veterinary scientist in that country who has been accused of research misconduct.
According to El Pais, the researcher, Jesús Ángel Lemus, whose areas of interest include the effects of toxins on birds, ran into trouble in December when colleagues complained to the Ethics Committee of the Higher Council for Scientific Research about the reproducibility of his results and other problems. That triggered an inquiry by the CSIC into Lemus’ body of work, an investigation that, evidently, could not find a body.
The American Heart Association, which publishes a number of journals, has issued an Expression of Concern about five papers in three of their publications, following allegations of image manipulation. All of the papers include Hiroaki Matsubara, of Kyoto Prefectural University, as a co-author.
It has come to the attention of the American Heart Association (AHA), in a public manner, that there are questions concerning a number of figures in several AHA journals’ articles…
The “public manner” was three posts last year on the Abnormal Science blog, available here, here and here, alleging that images were manipulated in the manuscripts, and that histology slides were reused.
Plagiarism is a frequent reason for retraction. Today, we’re pleased to present a guest post by Marya Zilberberg, a physician health services researcher and faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. In this post, she describes what it’s like to find out one of your papers has been plagiarized — and how to get satisfaction. Well, sort of.
Right or wrong, peer-reviewed publications in my trade are academic currency. They provide name recognition, invitations to review, edit and speak, and in general make you feel like a part of the “in-crowd.” Of course the most important metric that publications feed are the infamous h-index, which measures how “influential” your studies are by the number of citations they engender. So, like any other artificial grade, it makes sense to engage in intermittent care and watering of your h-index, and mine is pretty good for where I am in my career. Little did I realize that there is an even more important impact metric than the h-index: plagiarism.
There’s another non-unanimous retraction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week, and this one involves an anti-tumor antibody that may not be what the authors originally thought it was.
