If Retraction Watch was actually a business, as opposed — for the moment, anyway — to a labor of love for two guys with day jobs, 2011 would have been a very good year for business. It was a year that will probably see close to 400 retractions, including a number of high-profile ones, once … Continue reading The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011
Silvia Bulfone-Paus, the Borstel Institute researcher who was forced to step down as institute director and has already retracted 12 papers, has retracted another, this one in Transplantation. Here’s the text of the notice:
The Retraction Watch category for “lack of IRB approval” as a reason for retraction — a subject we covered in our most recent Lab Times column — is growing. First there were the 90-odd retractions by Joachim Boldt, then three by Australian researchers studying Aussie-rules football players. Now, we learn that the Journal of Clinical … Continue reading Lack of ethical approval leads to JCO retraction
Careful Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that one of the categories in our right-hand column under “by reason for retraction” is “lack of IRB approval.” That’s because in just over a year, we’ve written a number of posts about two cases of retractions for that reason. One was the now-infamous case of Joachim Boldt, who has … Continue reading Should authors have to retract papers based on data obtained unethically?
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the launch of Retraction Watch. We’d like to thank our readers, tipsters, and fans for your support and feedback — and our helpful critics who have spurred us to do better. Over the past 12 months we’ve written more than 250 posts about retractions ranging from the extraordinary — think … Continue reading Happy anniversary, Retraction Watch: What we’ve learned, and what’s in store for year two
If there’s any group of subjects a scientist wouldn’t want to piss off, it would have to be Aussie-rules football and rugby players, who are tough enough to make a saltwater crocodile wish it was a belt. And when those guinea pigs are suffering from low back pain — well, we shudder to think. The … Continue reading A dingo ate my IRB form: Journal cries foul over Aussie-rules football and rugby papers that lied
Flawed research that leads to retractions is a problem for editors, publishers and the scientific community. But what about patients? In a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics, R. Grant Steen asks the question — and answers it in the affirmative. We’ve heard from Steen before; he has written two recent papers on … Continue reading No academic matter: Study links retractions to patient harm
If a paper that has never been cited is retracted, will it be missed? Japanese researchers have retracted an obscure 1996 article in an equally obscure physics journal after concluding — some 15 years later — that their fundamental assertion was mistaken. The paper, “Uptake and excretion of cobalt in the crustacean Portunus trituberculatus,” in … Continue reading Another unofficial record? Authors walk back arcane blue crab paper — 15 years later
We’ve both been at conferences — Adam at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists in Savannah, and Ivan at the Council of Science Editors in Baltimore, where he’ll be on a panel today about finding fraud — so we haven’t had a lot of time to run down retractions. But there were a few retraction-related developments … Continue reading Roundup: A new record? And paper retracts story about Canadian Paxil researcher-turned pol Kutcher
Biochemical Journal has retracted two articles by Naoki Mori, bringing the total number of pulled papers by the Japanese cancer researcher to sixteen. As with the previous Mori retractions, the latest ones — of papers published in 2007 and 2010 — involve unreliable images. Mori, you’ll recall, had recycled control blots from study to study … Continue reading Two more retractions for Mori make 16 — but not a record