Scientists doing the right thing: Malfunctioning lab equipment leads to retraction of neuroscience paper

For the second time inside of a week, we come to praise scientists who did the right thing when they realized their lab equipment or reagents weren’t performing as expected.

Here’s the retraction of a 2011 paper in Cerebral Cortex:

Flu paper duplication earns Expression of Concern

A six year-old review on bird flu that failed to credit some content from another six year-old review of bird flu is now stamped with an Expression of Concern.

Here’s the notice, from Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses:

Proteomics paper retracted for plagiarized figure of mysterious origin

The journal Proteomics has retracted a paper for a plagiarized figure — but how the authors came to possess the image in the first place remains a mystery.

Here’s the notice:

Clare Francis scores a bullseye: Journal of Cell Biology paper retracted for image manipulation

If you’re a journal editor or publisher, there’s a good chance your email inbox has seen its share of emails from “Clare Francis,” who has been crusading against text and image duplication in papers for some years now. Some editors have grown quite weary of those emails, sometimes because they don’t want to deal with anonymous whistleblowers, and sometimes because they have found Clare’s claims to be without merit.

But the Journal of Cellular Biology is one journal that has apparently continued to take them seriously. Today, they retract “Follistatin induction by nitric oxide through cyclic GMP: a tightly regulated signaling pathway that controls myoblast fusion,” a 2006 paper about which Francis first raised concerns in early November. Here’s the notice, one of those wonderfully detailed ones that make us squeal like schoolgirls meeting the Beatles:

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:

Heart retracts stent-ReoPro paper over data dispute with authors (save one)

We’re a few months late on this one, but Heart, a BMJ title, issued a fascinating retraction notice in August about a meta-analysis on percutaneous coronary intervention (that’s stenting to you and me) after suffering a heart attack, and the drug abciximab, which is used to prevent clotting and additional near-term heart attacks. Abciximab is sold as ReoPro by Eli Lilly.

The article, “Clinical impact of intracoronary abciximab in patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention: an individual patient-data pooled analysis of randomised studies,” was published last May. But according to the retraction notice, the authors had neglected to include fresh data, already in the literature before their paper went live, that contradicted their overall findings.

Here’s the notice:

“Misconduct” leads to retraction from Italian “super surgeon” under house arrest

Has the Annals of Thoracic Surgery had a change of heart? Evidently the publication that told us nearly two years ago, in effect, that the reasons for retractions in its pages were “none of [our] damn business” has decided that information is worth sharing after all.

The ATS has retracted a paper it published in October. The article, titled “Development and Validation of a New Outcome Score in Subglottic Stenosis,” came from a group of researchers in Florence, Italy.

As the notice explains:

Two Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Advances retractions, for unreliable results, surprised author

Authors of two separate studies in RSC Advances — RSC is the Royal Society of Chemistry — have retracted their papers.

Here’s one notice, for “Laser-induced gold/chitosan nanocomposites with tailored wettability applied to multi-irradiated microfluidic channels:”

Bad vibrations: Composites paper pulled after subsequent, duplicate article appears

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering is retracting a 2011 paper by an Italian researcher who submitted a similar article to another journal. What makes this interesting is that the retracted article appears to be the one that was published first.

The article, “Free vibrations of laminated composite doubly-curved shells and panels of revolution via the GDQ method,” was written by Francesco Tornabene, an engineer at the University of Bologna and has been cited five times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As the notice explains:

Authors retract “one-center” cancer study for plagiarizing from…another center

The World Journal of Surgical Oncology has posted the retraction of a 2010 article by Italian researchers who lifted substantial parts of their text from a group that had published on the same topic seven years earlier.

The article, “Colon and rectal surgery for cancer without mechanical bowel preparation: one-center randomized prospective trial,” came from a group of surgical oncologists at San Martino Hospital in Genoa led by Stefano Scabini, who is listed in other publications as chief of the service.

According to the notice: