Authors retract Digestion paper for “unacceptably high number of errors”
A group of South Korean researchers has decided to withdraw a paper they recently published in the journal Digestion because it was filled with mistakes.
The paper, “Endoscopy-Based Decision Is Sufficient for Predicting Completeness in Lateral Resection Margin in Colon Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection,” was published earlier this year (and online in late 2011) by a group in Seoul. But according to the retraction notice:
We wish to withdraw our article ‘Endoscopy-Based Decision Is Sufficient for Predicting Completeness in Lateral Resection Margin in Colon Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection’ published in Digestion [2012;85:33–39] because it appears to contain an unacceptably high number of errors. The thematic focus continues to be relevant but the authors feel that greater caution and better judgment should have been exercised before submitting this particular article. As a consequence, all of the authors have decided to withdraw it from publication.
We’re not sure what “thematic focus” refers to.
I wonder what kind of errors these were… apparently not of the type that would have alerted reviewers.
CH
August 31, 2012 at 11:37 am
Probably the errors were too hard to digest…
Scientist
August 31, 2012 at 5:23 pm
I’ll try to translate the statement “The thematic focus continues to be relevant but the authors feel that greater caution and better judgment should have been exercised before submitting this particular article.”
Editors mean that Endoscopes can be used for the purpose that the authors say they did use Endoscope (the thematic focus continues to be relevant), however, authors’ conclusions are somewhat questionable/unreliable/non-replicable (greater caution and better judgment should have been exercised).
In other words, the technology has potential, so, please, do it properly next time.
YouKnowBestOfAll
September 1, 2012 at 6:10 am
Where is the cutoff between an acceptable number of errors and an unacceptably high number of errors?
Like CH, I wonder what sort of errors these were. Not spelling and punctuation, surely, and not things that reviewers would have noticed. “Greater caution and better judgment,” they mention. Hm.
JudyH
September 3, 2012 at 9:04 am