Nature corrects figures McGill committee found had been “intentionally contrived and falsified”

The second of two corrections by McGill researcher Maya Saleh for what a university committee called “intentionally contrived and falsified” figures has run in Nature.

We reported in January that the McGill committee concluded that

two figures in [a] Nature paper had been “intentionally contrived and falsified.” One of those figures was duplicated in a PNAS paper, which also contained an image that  had incorrectly labeled some proteins.

The committee recommended corrections for both of the papers. The PNAS correction ran in February. Now, the Nature Corrigendum has appeared:

Retraction for image issues forces correction of herbal remedies editorial

Back in March, we wrote about the case of Chinese researchers who pulled their 2011 paper in the Journal of Molecular Medicine on ginseng’s potential as a heart remedy because a couple of their images were suspect (duplicated was the word they’d used).

Turns out the journal suffered some collateral damage. JMM also has corrected a “Clinical Implications” article by a group of Canadian researchers about the defunct ginseng paper.

The article, “Use of ginseng to reduce post-myocardial adverse myocardial remodeling: applying scientific principles to the use of herbal therapies,”  appeared in the same issue as the original, but for some reason the correction notice appeared online only last week.

It states:

Musical figures: PNAS paper corrected with version of “intentionally contrived and falsified” Nature figure

One of the two corrections recommended by a McGill committee for work by Maya Saleh and colleagues has appeared, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

As we reported last month, the committee found that

two figures in [a] Nature paper had been “intentionally contrived and falsified.” One of those figures was duplicated in a PNAS paper, which also contained an image that  had incorrectly labeled some proteins.

The committee recommended that both of the papers be corrected, and the PNAS correction  for “Confinement of caspase-12 proteolytic activity to autoprocessing” reads as follows:

A retracted Cell paper reappears elsewhere, sans author who didn’t sign retraction notice

One of the things we try to do here at Retraction Watch is keep tabs on retracted work that appears again the literature. We did that twice in one day last year, once with a paper about chimps that was retracted from Biology Letters and ended up in the Journal of Human Evolution, and then again with a PLOS ONE paper on on “longevity genes” that had been retracted from Science.

Today, we have another case.

McGill committee says Nature figures were “intentionally contrived and falsified”

Maya Saleh, via McGill

An associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification, Retraction Watch has learned.

Concerns had been raised about four papers by Maya Saleh and colleagues:

Duplication leads to retraction of 1997 paper on heart disease genes

A top cardiology researcher, Robert Hegele, of the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, has retracted a 15-year-old review after editors were made aware that it was “very similar” to another of his reviews.

Here’s the December 2012 notice for the paper, which has been cited 23 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:

University of Waterloo suspends researcher who published plagiarized paper — in his own journal

Dongqing Li

Dongqing Li, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has been suspended without pay for four months resulting from an investigation into a paper he published that contained rampant plagiarism.

Oh, and the offending article appeared in a journal Li founded — and of which he was the top editor.

The Globe and Mail has a CTV video report about the university’s actions, which you can watch here. As we reported back in August, Li and a graduate student, Yasaman Daghighi, were forced to retract their 2010 article in Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, “Induced-charge electrokinetic phenomena” because:

Authors retract Diabetes paper after submitting it “without knowledge of inherent errors”

A group of neuroscientists has retracted a paper published earlier this last year in Diabetes after realizing that a figure that took up a whole page of the paper may not have been quite right.

Here’s the notice for “Blockade of receptor for advanced glycation end products in a model of type 1 diabetic leukoencephalopathy”:

Another retraction for Pfizer’s experimental cancer treatment figitumumab

Last month, we brought you news that Pfizer had retracted a paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology

purporting to show a benefit of their experimental drug for lung cancer figitumumab after discovering that its clinical lead on the project had done analyses improperly.

There’s been another retraction, of a related paper, in the British Journal of Cancer, “Pre-treatment levels of circulating free IGF-1 identify NSCLC patients who derive clinical benefit from figitumumab.” Here’s the notice:

Quantum physicists learn about Heisenberg’s (publishing) uncertainty principle the hard way

As Werner Heisenberg famously conjectured, you can’t measure an atomic particle’s momentum and position at the same time. But perhaps the principle named for the German physicist and godfather of quantum mechanics should be applied to another important scientific truth: you can’t publish the same article in two different but competing journals.

Just ask a group led by Ted Sargent, a prominent physicist at the University of Toronto. He and his colleagues recently lost a paper in Thin Solid Films — which sounds like it ought to be the name of an indie movie company, dibs! — on quantum dot solar cells. (If those sound familiar to readers of this blog, there’s a good reason. We wrote about the retraction of another quantum dot paper, this one in Nature Photonics, in October of this year.)

Sargent’s article, “Advances in colloidal quantum dot solar cells: The depleted-heterojunction device,” which he wrote with colleagues in Spain and Switzerland, appeared in August 2011. According to the notice: