Pfizer database errors cause two voluminous retractions for JACC statin-biomarker papers

Coding errors in a database maintained by Pfizer have led authors to retract two heart biomarker papers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The two notices, for “Prediction of cardiovascular events in statin-treated patients by lipid and non-lipid biomarkers” and “Plasma PCSK9 levels and clinical outcomes in the TNT (Treating to New Targets) Trial,” are highly detailed and say the same thing:

Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters

We’re not sure how many you need for a “slew,” but we’ve seen five retractions in Neuroscience Letters recently, most of them because researchers republished translations of papers in English, so we thought we’d round them up in a post.

We’ll start the count — appropriately, we think — with the notice for “Simple mental arithmetic is not so simple: An ERP study of the split and odd–even effects in mental arithmetic“, published in February by researchers from Nanjing Normal University in China:

Buyer beware: Conflict Resolution Quarterly pulls paper for plagiarism

Conflict Resolution Quarterly, which we probably all should read but don’t, is retracting a 2010 paper on commercial interactions by a French researcher who combined two other articles into a work he called his own.

But, true to its name, the journal takes a more, shall we say, diplomatic approach to the affair.

Here’s the notice (which, tsk tsk, is behind a paywall):

Another retraction for grad student who specializes in plagiarism and forging co-authors’ names

We have an update on the case of Moêz Smiri, a graduate student working in a Tunisian-French laboratory, whose bold method of bulking up his CV  proved a bit trop ambitieux. 

As we reported back in August 2011, Smiri had plagiarized repeatedly from previously-published work, and forged the names of co-authors, in a 2010 article in Plant Science on the effects of cadmium on peas. That article was one of at least six papers on which Smiri appeared as first author — a pretty impressive output for a young researcher.

Among the list was article in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, “Effect of cadmium on resumption of respiration in cotyledons of germinating pea seeds.” That paper is now retracted. According to the notice:

Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems

Back in April, a group of French and Tunisian researchers published a paper in Biomaterials which came to the astonishing conclusion that buckyballs (carbon tetrachloride) coated in olive oil could dramatically extend the lives of lab rodents. That news was picked up by Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, on which he expressed some bemusement about the work but ultimately praised it:

These are reasonable (but unproven) hypotheses, and I very much look forward to seeing this work followed up to see some more light shed on them. The whole life-extension result needs to be confirmed as well, and in other species. I congratulate the authors of this work, though, for giving me the most number of raised eyebrows I’ve had while reading a scientific paper in quite some time.

One of those eyebrows dropped a bit the following day, when Lowe reported that readers had pointed him to a clear case of image duplication in the article. At the time, Lowe concluded:

Tell-tale hearts: Cardiology journals retract redundant articles

The European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery has retracted a 2007 article by Chinese researchers after the senior author decided he liked the data so nice he’d publish them twice. And he appears to have done so without the knowledge of the corresponding author.

Here’s the notice for the paper, titled “Open-heart surgery in patients with liver cirrhosis”:

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:

Pair of graphene papers retracted

Graphene has been hot for several years. Here’s what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had to say about it in 2010 when awarding two researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work:

Graphene is a form of carbon. As a material it is completely new – not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.

But one researcher may have allowed his enthusiasm for graphene to get ahead of him. He and his unwitting co-authors have now lost two papers thanks to that enthusiasm.

Salami slicing and heart attacks don’t mix: Duplication, lack of transparency lead to retraction

A group of French cardiology researchers have retracted a study of a potential way to rule out heart attacks, after it became clear they had used data from another study without alerting the journal.

In an unusually forthright letter accompanying the retraction of “Concomitant measurement of copeptin and high-sensitivity troponin for fast and reliable rule out of acute myocardial infarction,” originally published in Intensive Care Medicine, Bruno Riou and colleagues note:

Plagiarism leads to seven retractions (and counting) in the conservation literature

Serge Valentin Pangou

An ecology researcher in the Congo has found himself at the center of a plagiarism scandal that has felled seven of his papers.

As Science reports today, Serge Valentin Pangou’s work began unraveling in August 2011 after Wageningen University ecologist Patrick Jansen thought a paper he’d been asked to review for the International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation seemed familiar — because he’d written many of the same words in a 2007 paper in Conservation Biology. He ran the manuscript through the plagiarism detection software Turnitin, and sure enough, it was about 90% identical.

Unfortunately for Pangou, Jansen’s co-author on the Conservation Biology paper was Pierre-Michel Forget, whose father, as Science notes, “was a well-known private detective in France.” Forget and Jansen took a careful look at a number of Pangou’s papers,