Why I retracted my Nature paper: A guest post from David Vaux about correcting the scientific record

Last month, Ivan met David Vaux at the 3^rd World Conference on Research Integrity in Montreal. David mentioned a retraction he published in Nature, and we thought it would be a great guest post on what it’s like to retract one of your own papers in an attempt to clean up the literature.

David Vaux

In September 1995 Nature asked me to review a manuscript by Bellgrau and co-workers, which subsequently appeared. I was very excited by this paper, as it showed that expression of CD95L on Sertoli cells in allogeneic mismatched testes tissue transplanted under the kidney capsule was able to induce apoptosis of invading cytotoxic T cells, thereby preventing rejection. As I wrote in a News and Views piece, the implications of these findings were enormous – grafts engineered to express CD95L would be able to prevent rejection without generalized immunosuppression.

In fact, I was so taken by these findings that we started generation of transgenic mice that expressed CD95L on their islet beta cells to see if it would allow islet cell grafts to avoid rejection and provide a cure for diabetes in mismatched recipients.

Little did we know that instead of providing an answer to transplant rejection, these experiments would teach us a great deal about editorial practices and the difficulty of correcting errors once they appear in the literature.

A masterbatch: More polymer retractions, gerontology journal lifts paywall, Microbiology notices appear

Germans and Italians are big masterbatchers. Click to enlarge. via http://bit.ly/100YBKB

Our mothers told us that if we used the masterbatch process, we’d go blind. And what better way to gather some updates to recent posts than to include one that involves said masterbatch process?

First, a retraction John Spevacek noticed when he tried clicking on the link in a Journal of Applied Polymer Science retraction we’d covered:

See one, do one, copy one? E-learning paper retracted for plagiarism

Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences is retracting a 2012 paper on a “model approach” to e-learning that well, was anything but a model approach to scientific publishing.

The article, “Implications of E-learning systems and self-efficiency on students outcomes: a model approach,” was written by Tanzila Saba, who has been affiliated with institutions in Malaysia and Pakistan.

According to the retraction notice:

Double submission leads to retraction of probability paper — and a publishing ban

What are the chances of successfully duplicating publication in the Journal of Theoretical Probability? Not too high, it seems.

A pair of South Korean authors have gotten a five-year ban from the journal for double-publishing a paper in the math literature.

The article, “Convergence of Weighted Sums for Arrays of Negatively Dependent Random Variables and Its Applications,” was written by Jong-Il Baek and Sung-Tae Park of Wonkwang University in IkSan.

According to the retraction notice:

Lost from translation(al) medicine: Publisher error leads to retraction

A technical hiccup led the Journal of Translational Medicine to double publish a 2012 paper by a pair of researchers from China and the United States, leading to a retraction.

The article is/was titled “Opportunities and challenges of disease biomarkers: a new section in the journal of translational medicine,” and it was written by Xiangdong Wang and Peter Ward — both members of the journal’s editorial board. It appeared in the Nov. 7, 2012 issue of the JTM. And it appeared less than a month later, on Dec. 5.

A fifth retraction for former Pitt and Hopkins oncology researcher Getzenberg

A cancer researcher whose work was the subject of a lawsuit has retracted his fifth paper, this one from 2004.

Robert Getzenberg, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins, has had two papers on prostate cancer biomarkers retracted, and two on colon cancer. The newly retracted paper is about a potential bladder cancer biomarker.

Here’s the notice from Clinical Cancer Research:

Four papers about gaming and virtual worlds become more virtual and less reality as they’re retracted

The International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction has retracted four papers about virtual reality for reasons that aren’t quite clear.

The common author of the studies is Dong-Hee Shin of Seoul’s Sungkyunkwan University. Here’s the retraction notice, which is signed by journal editors-in-chief Gavriel Salvendy and Julie Jacko: