Last December, Elisabeth Bik notified journals about 45 articles by a researcher in China which struck her as suspicious. Within weeks, one of those journals — DNA and Cell Biology — had retracted the paper she’d flagged.
That reassuringly brisk response appears to have been an anomaly in the case of Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China. Only two other retractions have followed, by our count (Tang had a retraction in 2020, bringing his total so far to four). However, FEBS Letters, which published three articles by Tang that Bik had identified as problematic, has now issued expressions of concern for the papers.
The notices for the articles, which appeared between 2011 and 2014, raise questions about the “data integrity” in the work. Here’s the one for “Downregulation of PPP2R5E expression by miR-23a suppresses apoptosis to facilitate the growth of gastric cancer cells,” from 2014:
Continue reading ‘We apologize again for the inadvertent mistakes during the assembly of data due to our carelessness’