Salon today retracted a controversial 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about an alleged link between autism and thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccines.
As Salon explains in their retraction notice, the online magazine had co-published the piece with Rolling Stone. The notice reads, in part: Continue reading Salon retracts 2005 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. piece on alleged autism-vaccine link
As readers of this blog have no doubt sensed by now, the number of retractions per year seems to be on the rise. We feel that intuitively as we uncover more and more of them, but there are also data to suggest this is true.
As if to demonstrate that, we’ve been trying to find time to write this post for more than a week, since the author of the study we’ll discuss sent us his paper. Writing about all the retractions we learned about, however, kept us too busy.
But given how sharp Retraction Watch readers are, you will be quick to note that more retractions doesn’t necessarily mean a higher rate. After all, there were about 527,000 papers published in 2000, and 852,000 published in 2009, so a constant rate of retractions would still mean a higher number. Here’s what Grant Steen, who published a paper on retractions and fraud last month in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found when he ran those numbers: Continue reading Is scientific fraud on the rise?
Late last month we wrote about a handful of retractions involving Naoki Mori, a promising Japanese cancer researcher who appears to have built a CV with the help of fabricated evidence.
The fraud earned Mori a 10-year publishing ban from the American Society of Microbiology, which publishes Infection and Immunity. There were two other retractions in Blood, from the American Society of Hematology.
Now, another journal has joined the party. Continue reading Fraud by Naoki Mori claims another paper, this one in a journal whose board he sits on
A quick post this Sunday morning to draw your attention to two must-read items for anyone interested in the Anil Potti case or in how one goes about checking data. (A second paper by Potti et al was officially retracted on Friday.)
First, a terrific profile of Joyce Shoffner in the Charlotte News & Observer. Shoffner
was one of 110 Duke patients enrolled in three clinical trials based on the research of Dr. Anil Potti, who resigned in November as an associate professor at Duke.
Here at Retraction Watch, we obviously think all retractions are worth following. But we hope this story will convince those who shrug and say such items are inside baseball, or “none of your damn business,” that they need to re-evaluate their positions. This is where the rubber hits the road: Continue reading Update on Anil Potti: A patient in a trial based on retracted research speaks out; Baggerly on how to prevent the next fiasco
Nature Medicine has retracted a paper that Anil Potti’s co-author, Joseph Nevins, requested be withdrawn in November.
This is the second retraction of a paper by Potti, who resigned from his post at Duke in November in the midst of an investigation into scientific misconduct. The first retraction was in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
According to the Nature Medicine retraction notice: Continue reading Nature Medicine makes it official, retracting Anil Potti paper
The authors of a 2006 Journal of Immunology study have retracted it after it dawned on them that they used the wrong mice.
The study, “Endogenous IL-1R1 Signaling Is Critical for Cognate CD41 T Cell Help for Induction of In Vivo Type 1 and Type 2 Antipolysaccharide and Antiprotein Ig Isotype Responses to Intact Streptococcus pneumoniae, but Not to a Soluble Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine,” has been cited 11 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Authors of Journal of Immunology paper retract it after realizing they had ordered the wrong mice
At least one of the dominoes may be falling from a scandal at Research Center Borstel.
Retraction Watch has learned that one of six papers that an investigation found to include data manipulation will be retracted by the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. The paper, “ATP induces P2X7 receptor-independent cytokine and chemokine expression through P2X1 and P2X3 receptors in murine mast cells,” includes Silvia Bulfone-Paus as a co-author. The retraction notice will appear in the March issue of the journal, editor Luis Montaner told Retraction Watch today.
Bulfone-Paus is at the center of a complex case, and we’ll refer you to Nature‘s excellent coverage. As Nature reported last month: Continue reading Paper by Silvia Bulfone-Paus to be retracted
If you’re a savvy Retraction Watch reader — or if you’ve paid any attention at all to the news in the last 18 hours — you will have heard by now that the BMJ has called Andrew Wakefield’s work on autism and the MMR vaccine a “hoax.”
The February 2010 retraction of the original Wakefield paper in the Lancet was, of course, a huge deal. If there were a Canon of Scientific Retractions, it would be in it. It happened before we launched Retraction Watch, however, so we haven’t commented much on it.
We plan on writing about major retractions in history, but the frequency of fascinating timely ones hasn’t abated enough yet to let us do that. (One exception: Our Best of Retractions series.) And in any case, there have been a lot of pixels spilled on this one already, so we’re not sure we have much to add. That’s the nice thing about the web: It leaves us free to curate as well as create.
One comment we want to offer is that the investigation by Brian Deer in the BMJ Continue reading Some quick thoughts and links on Andrew Wakefield, the BMJ, autism, vaccines, and fraud
Plagiarism can involve the theft of words, and we’ve covered plenty of such cases (like this one). But here’s a case of what appears to be more wholesale lifting of everything from ideas to assays.
The Journal of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology (JMMB), a Karger title, has retracted an October 2010 paper, “Characterization of Methyltransferase Properties of Escherichia coli YabC Protein with an Enzyme-Coupled Colorimetric Assay,” by Jingsong Gu and Chunjiang Ye. Both of those scientists are in the department of biotechnology at the University of Jinan in China.
Gu had trained as a postdoctoral research in the laboratory of biologist Elaine Newman, of Concordia University in Montreal who describes herself as a “long time friend” of E. coli. (As they say, with friends like that, who needs enemas?)
The retraction notice — a trio of remarkably revealing letters — begins with an apologia from the authors: Continue reading ME-Coli: Germ paper retracted after mentor accuses authors of idea theft
Yesterday, we reported on the retraction of a 2004 study in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. As we noted, the notice’s language was, um, fuzzy, referring vaguely to
an investigation by the University of Florida, which uncovered instances of repetitious, tabulated data from previously published studies.
Today, we are slightly more clear, although what we really got was an earful of other language.
We had the pleasure of speaking this morning with L. Henry Edmunds, Jr., the long-time editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, who gave us a better sense of why his retraction notice was so delicately worded. Edmunds, responding to question of why the letter didn’t say more about the matter:
It’s none of your damn business.
Ranting against “journalists and bloggists,” Edmunds, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, said the purpose of the retraction notice was merely Continue reading Why was that paper retracted? Editor to Retraction Watch: “It’s none of your damn business”