‘Molecular characterization’ errors lead to retraction from medicinal chemistry journal

The European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry has published a curious retraction notice for a paper in its February 2012 issue from a group of Indian scientists.

The abstract of the article,”Proton-pumping-ATPase-targeted antifungal activity of cinnamaldehyde based sulfonyl tetrazoles,” is still available on Medline:

Here’s what the abstract of the paper said about the study:

Millennium Villages Project forced to correct Lancet paper on foreign aid as leader leaves team

A senior member of a high-profile foreign aid research team has left the project on the heels of a Lancet correction of a heavily criticized paper the team published earlier this month.

Paul Pronyk, who until last week was director of monitoring and evaluation at Columbia University’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development, which runs the Millennium Villages Project, wrote a letter to the Lancet acknowledging errors in the paper, “The effect of an integrated multisector model for achieving the Millennium Development Goals and improving child survival in rural sub-Saharan Africa: a non-randomised controlled assessment,” originally published May 8. That admission came after Jesse Bump, Michael Clemens, Gabriel Demombynes, and Lawrence Haddad wrote a letter criticizing the work, which was published this week accompanied by corrections to the paper:

Why retraction notices matter: Group’s repeated misuse of figures gets different play from five journals

For some journals, thorough retraction notices are the rule — and, when misconduct is involved, the price authors pay for abusing the trust of the editors and the readers. Others seem to take a more casual approach. Guess which we think is best.

Consider the case of a group of researchers in China led by Tan Jinquan, an immune system expert at Wuhan University. Over the past two years or so, Jinquan and colleagues have lost no fewer than a half-dozen papers containing evidence of image manipulation. But, depending on the journal pulling the articles, you might not know it.

An Immunity retraction for Luk van Parijs, three years after the ORI found evidence of fabrication in the paper

Earlier this month, we reported on a correction by Luk van Parijs, the biologist the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fired in 2005 after he admitted to making up data.

Immunity has now run a retraction involving van Parijs, dated May 25, 2012, for 2003′s “Autoimmunity as the Consequence of a Spontaneous Mutation in Rasgrp1″:

Not for the faint of heart: Cardiologists retract syncope paper after realizing data columns weren’t aligned right

Post written by contributor Trevor Stokes

Improperly aligned columns have cost researchers at the Mayo Clinic a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The paper originally concluded that fainting spells (syncope) give patients with high blood pressure in their lung arteries poor prognoses, an observation that turned out to be incorrect.

The problem? The group merged two electronic databases, but did not align columns properly, a problem found only after first author Rachel Le revisited the dataset looking to cull more data.

The retraction notice published on May 22 (the one on ScienceDirect is free to air, while the one on the JACC site is behind a paywall):

Three more retractions for Vietnamese physicists who plagiarized a plagiarized paper

Last week, we brought you the story of Thong Duc Le and his colleagues, physicists who were forced to retract four papers, including one that cited, as we noted “their own study that had already been retracted for plagiarism.”

The team has now retracted three more papers:

Mighty molten powder researchers publish paper in journal twice, months apart

A group of French researchers liked their paper on the properties of molten tin so much they published it twice. In the same journal. Four months apart.

The article, “Nitrogen spray atomization of molten tin metal: Powder morphology characteristics,” first appeared online in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. That one has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

In May 2007, the same group, sans two authors, published a paper online in the JMPT (and in January 2008 in print) with the identical title. That article — which managed to get cited three times — has now been retracted:

Potential retraction record holder Fujii to Anaesthesia: I’m no stats expert, but my studies have “integrity”

As we reported earlier this spring, the UK journal Anaesthesia published a remarkable statistical analysis of the work of Yoshitaka Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist who has been accused of fabricating his results for years — and who, we’re led to believe, may soon wind up with the record for retractions, at a number north of 190.

Fujii has responded to the journal with an equally startling (for different reasons, of course) rebuttal. We received permission from Steve Yentis, Anaesthesia‘s editor, to reprint the letter in its entirely. We present it here, and strongly recommend that readers take a look at the journal’s website to read the piece that prompted Fujii’s response:

Authors retract two Cell Metabolism papers after “data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory”

A group of researchers at the University of Utah has retracted two papers from Cell Metabolism after they realized that a dismissed employee had tossed out data that were the basis of some error-laden figures.

Here’s the notice for both papers:

Leading cancer vaccines researcher retracts paper for figure “discrepancies” flagged by watchdog blog

Gerold Schuler, a German immunology researcher who shared the 2006 Deutscher Krebspreis — aka the German Cancer Prize — for his work that contributed to cancer vaccines has retracted a paper in International Immunology following concerns raised by a German science watchdog blog.

Here’s the notice: