In what could be a significant blow to a major pharmaceutical company, Nature Medicine is reportedly set to retract a 2010 article by a group of researchers affiliated with a Chinese arm of the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. We’re not the first to report the news — you can read coverage of it on In the … Continue reading Glaxo asks Nature Medicine to retract paper by fired company scientist
Here at Retraction Watch, we like to dig for what lies behind sometimes opaque retraction notices. But today, thanks to Neil Martin, we have a glimpse into something a bit different: The back-and-forth between an author and his editor. In Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Peter Reiner, of the University of British Columbia, wrote a comment on … Continue reading And the award for the most self-referential abstract ever goes to…
A group of pharmacology researchers in the UK has lost two papers after submitting effectively identical versions to different journals — and getting them accepted, of course — just a day apart. The first article appeared on the British Journal of Pharmacology‘s website on July 10, 2012. It was titled “Exendin-4 reverts behavioural and neurochemicaldysfunction … Continue reading Duplicate submission costs authors two papers on Parkinson’s disease
Yesterday we reported that Cell was looking into problematic images in a recent paper on human embryonic stem cell cloning. We’ve now heard from the journal about the nature of the inquiry. Mary Beth O’Leary, a spokeswoman for Cell Press — an Elsevier title — tells us that: Based on our own initial in-house assessment … Continue reading Cell attributes image problems in cloning paper to “minor” errors; sees no impact on conclusions
The Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering ran a retraction yesterday that’s left us scratching our heads. The paper, “Wettability-gradient-driven micropump for transporting discrete liquid drops,” was published on February 8 of this year. For a paper published in a journal run by the Institute of Physics, the retraction notice reads like a mix of Hindenburg … Continue reading How does a paper get published without the alleged corresponding author knowing?
Nanotech researcher SK Sahoo, whom as we reported in February lost four papers from Acta Biomaterialia for what the journal called “highly unethical practices,” has actually retracted five papers from that journal. According to a notice for “Enhanced cellular uptake and in vivo pharmacokinetics of rapamycin loaded cubic phase nanoparticles for cancer therapy” that appears … Continue reading Nanotech researcher SK Sahoo notches fifth retraction
The Journal of Multivariate Analysis has retracted a paper it was never meant to publish — a problem, it seems, of multivariate analyses. The article, titled “Regression estimation with locally stationary long-memory errors,” came from a pair of statisticians in Chile, Wildredo Palma and Guillermo Ferreira. It appears that the article did not pass muster … Continue reading Editor inadvertently spurns reviewers; retraction ensues
Iranian scientists have lost one of two articles they submitted — and published — simultaneously to different journals. Watch as confusion ensues. The retracted paper, “Permeability Estimation of a Reservoir Based on Neural Networks Coupled with Genetic Algorithms,” appeared online in August 2011 in Petroleum Science and Technology, a Taylor & Francis journal. According to the liner … Continue reading Double-dipping leads to removal of petroleum research paper
Two more papers by Diederik Stapel — who was profiled by The New York Times Magazine this weekend — have been retracted, both in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The notice for “Hardly thinking about close and distant others: On cognitive business and target closeness in social comparison effects,” by Stapel and David Marx, … Continue reading “Unfinished business”: Diederik Stapel retraction count rises to 53
A team of researchers in Ireland has retracted two papers from Cancer Letters after concerns were apparently raised about some of the studies’ figures. Denise Egan, of the Institute of Technology Tallaght in Dublin, and colleagues published “In vitro anti-tumour and cyto-selective effects of coumarin-3-carboxylic acid and three of its hydroxylated derivatives, along with their … Continue reading Two cancer papers retracted because authors “are unable to guarantee the accuracy of some of the figures”