February: ‘we don’t agree there is an issue here.’ June: Retracted.

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper on hepatitis C infection it had previously corrected for problematic data – but in between the editors declared the case closed. The paper, “The interaction between microRNA-152 and DNA methyltransferase-1 as an epigenetic prognostic biomarker in HCV-induced liver cirrhosis and HCC patients,” was published in July 2019 … Continue reading February: ‘we don’t agree there is an issue here.’ June: Retracted.

Frustrated by a university’s lack of action, a journal retracts

Expression of concern, meet expression of frustration. Eight months ago, in the wake of skepticism about the data in a 2017 paper it had published, the Obstetrics & Gynecology issued an EoC about the article. At the time, the journal, an official title of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said it had contacted … Continue reading Frustrated by a university’s lack of action, a journal retracts

“Questioned as implausible:” Journal retracts paper because a researcher claimed to perform a large clinical trial single-handedly

Is it possible for just one researcher to perform a clinical trial of more than 200 participants? According to the editorial board of the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, an Elsevier title, the answer would seem to be no. The journal has decided to retract a 2016 paper in which the … Continue reading “Questioned as implausible:” Journal retracts paper because a researcher claimed to perform a large clinical trial single-handedly

“Questioned as implausible:” Journal retracts paper because a researcher claimed to perform a large clinical trial single-handedly

Is it possible for just one researcher to perform a clinical trial of more than 200 participants? According to the editorial board of the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, an Elsevier title, the answer would seem to be no. The journal has decided to retract a 2016 paper in which the … Continue reading “Questioned as implausible:” Journal retracts paper because a researcher claimed to perform a large clinical trial single-handedly

“This is something that we have never seen before in any study:” Group loses two more papers

A group of rheumatology researchers in Egypt that lost a paper in 2016 for a variety of problems has lost two more. The authors common to the two papers, Anna Abou-Raya and Suzan Abou-Raya, are based at the University of Alexandria, which did not find evidence of scientific misconduct, according to one of the retraction … Continue reading “This is something that we have never seen before in any study:” Group loses two more papers

Author duplicated a figure in three papers; two get retracted

Two journals have retracted two papers by the same group within months of each other, after editors were independently tipped off that they contained duplicated figures representing different experiments. The two papers were published by PLOS ONE and The Egyptian Journal of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (EJBMB) in 2015 and 2014, respectively. According to the PLOS ONE paper’s corresponding author, last […]

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Nightmare scenario: Text stolen from manuscript during review

A food science journal has retracted a paper over “a breach of reviewer confidentiality,” after editors learned it contained text from an unpublished manuscript — which one of the authors appears to have reviewed for another journal. The publisher and editors-in-chief of the Journal of Food Process Engineering became aware of the breach when the author of […]

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Journals pull two papers after blogger shares plagiarism suspicions

Journals have retracted two papers after they were flagged by a pseudonymous blogger, who suspected all had copied text from other sources. What’s more, a third paper seems to have simply disappeared from the journal’s website, after the blogger, Neuroskeptic, alerted the journal to the text overlap. Neuroskeptic became suspicious about the three unrelated papers – […]

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Sting operation forces predatory publisher to pull paper

Sometimes, the best way to expose a problem with the publishing process is to put it to a test — perhaps by performing a Sokal-style hoax, or submitting a paper with obvious flaws. In 2014, that’s just what a researcher in Kosovo did. Suspicious that a journal wasn’t doing a thorough job of vetting submissions, she decided to […]

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Author of retracted math paper defends against plagiarism charge, threatens to sue journal

A researcher in Egypt is threatening to sue a mathematics journal if it doesn’t un-retract one of his papers. The American Journal of Computational Mathematics in May retracted Mostafa M. A. Khater‘s 2015 paper, “The Modified Simple Equation Method and Its Applications in Mathematical Physics and Biology.” The retraction notice is sparse on the details, indicating […]

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