Paper on partially entangled states retracted for partially entangling authors

A paper on partially entangled states seems to have fallen victim to a confusing entanglement of authors and studies.

Here’s the notice for the paper, “Optimal quantum communication using multiparticle partially entangled states,” by Atul Kumar, Satyabrata Adhikari, Subhashish Banerjee, and Sovik Roy:

Update: Microbiologists face two more retractions for Northern blot problems

We have an update on a case we reported last week involving four papers in two different journals. The Journal of Bacteriology retracted two papers by Carlos Barreiro and colleagues, in notices that referred to the fact that

…identical bands for the 16S rRNA probe controls in the Northern blots were reported to correspond to experiments using different strains and experimental conditions in articles published in this journal and in Microbiology over a period of 5 years…

We checked with the editor of Microbiology, Agnes Fouet, who tells us:

Two Journal of Bacteriology papers retracted for data duplication spanning five years

A group of bacteria researchers in Spain and Germany has lost two papers in the Journal of Bacteriology after the journal found evidence that they had reused figures.

The two notices, for “Heat Shock Proteome Analysis of Wild-Type Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 and a Spontaneous Mutant Lacking GroEL1, a Dispensable Chaperone” and “Transcriptional Analysis of the groES-groEL1, groEL2, and dnaK genes in Corynebacterium glutamicum: Characterization of Heat Shock-Induced Promoters,” say the same thing:

Diabetes paper retracted for “misgrouping errors” that remain under investigation

A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota have retracted a paper in Diabetes for image problems, but exactly what happened is still under investigation.

Here’s the notice:

Retraction appears for former Case Western dermatology researcher found by ORI to have falsified data

Bryan William Doreian, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have falsified data in his Case Western dissertation, has retracted a 2009 paper in Molecular Biology of the Cell also cited by the ORI.

Here’s the notice:

Spud dud, as agricultural industry potato paper gets pulled a decade after publication

Plant Physiology, the official journal of the American Society of Plant Biologists, has retracted a 2004 article by a team of ag industry researchers, including a former husband-wife duo, for what could be misconduct by the husband.

The retraction notice is vague enough, however, that we’re not entirely sure what went wrong, and no one wants to help us confirm — or even attempted to disprove — our inferences.

Med student loses paper when former boss claims right to data

As a first-year medical student at the University of California, San Diego, Jessica Tang already has an impressive CV. Her name has appeared on ten papers in the medical literature, including three in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. On one of these she was the sole author.

Except that one doesn’t exist anymore. But the reason for the retraction does not appear to involve shoddy work by the researcher. Rather, Tang failed to appreciate the politics of the lab in which she worked — and it cost her.

Accounting fraud paper retracted for “misstatement”

The Accounting Review, a publication of the American Accounting Association, has retracted a 2010 paper, but the reason for the move is less than clear.

The article, “A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion,” was by James E. Hunton, an award-winning accountancy prof at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., and Anna Gold [updated 1/22/13 to update link], of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It has been cited 24 times, according to Google Scholar.

According to the retraction notice:

Group investigated by University of Louisville corrects lung cancer paper after retracting six others

A group of researchers whose work has been under investigation at the University of Louisville has issued a correction for a paper in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology (AJRCMB).

The correction follows three retractions each in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the AJRCMB, the latter of which made it clear that lab member ShouWei Han was responsible for the manipulations and duplications that brought down the papers. Here’s the new notice, which appeared in the March 1, 2012 issue of the journal:

Crise de foie: Liver journals retract duplicate biomarker pubs

Two liver journals have retracted articles from a group of Irani researchers who published similar — but not quite identical — versions of the same paper some months apart.

A retraction notice in the Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases — which bills itself as the “Official Journal of the Romanian Societies of Gastroenterology” — explains what happened: