Updated at 1:40 p.m. Eastern: When original posted, this item reported, correctly, that the South Carolina Board of Medical Examiners’ website listed Anil Potti’s license as “suspended.” However, that status has now been changed to “active,” along with “No disciplinary action taken by the Board. This certifies that the above licensee is in good standing.” We are working to figure out why the status was changed.

Update, 1:55 p.m.: The Board tells us they made a mistake:

I looked into this matter and apparently this was a clerical error on our part because there are no public orders at this time. You should see this reflected on our licensee lookup system within 24 hours. Sorry for any confusion.

Anil Potti, the former Duke oncology researcher who lost his job at a South Carolina oncology practice earlier this week, has had his South Carolina medical license suspended, SCNow reports.

The South Carolina Board of Medical Examiners now lists Potti’s license — which he was granted on April 6, 2011 — as “suspended.” “active.”

We had a look at his other licenses. Potti’s North Carolina license, which was the subject of a reprimand late last year, remains active, according to that state board’s website. He also holds a license from the State of Missouri, which remains active. His Minnesota license, which expired in 2008, is listed as “cancelled, inactive,” without any corrective or disciplinary actions.

Potti has now retracted 10 papers and is the subject of ongoing investigations.

Hat tip: Commenter CTP

[Edward] Wegman was the senior author of a 2006 report to Congress that criticized climate scientists as excessively collaborative, and found fault with a statistical technique used in two climate studies. Portions of the report analysis were published in the journal, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, in a 2008 study.

University of Massachusetts professor Raymond Bradley filed a complaint against Wegman in 2010, noting that portions of the report and the CSDA study appeared lifted from one of his textbooks and from other sources, including Wikipedia. CSDA later retracted the study, noting the plagiarism, last year.

Here’s the explicit retraction notice:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and co-Editors, as it contain portions of other authors’ writings on the same topic in other publications, without sufficient attribution to these earlier works being given. The principal authors of the paper acknowledged that text from background sources was mistakenly used in the Introduction without proper reference to the original source. Specifically, the first page and a half of the article (pp. 2177–2178) contain together excerpts from Wikipedia (first paragraph), Wasserman and Faust’s “Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications” (pp. 17–20) ISBN 10: 0-521-38707-8; ISBN 13: 978-0-521-38707-1. Publication Date: 1994, and W. de Nooy, A. Mrvar and V. Bategelj’s “Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek”” (pp. 31, 36, 123, and 133) ISBN 10: 0-521-60262-9; ISBN 13: 978-0-521-60262-4. Publication Date: 2005.

The scientific community takes a strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. The re-use of material, without appropriate reference, even if not known to the authors at the time of submission, breaches our publishing policies.

That constituted misconduct, according to one George Mason committee. From a letter signed by provost Peter Stearns:

Concerning the Computational Statistics article, the relevant committee did find that plagiarism occurred in contextual sections of the article, as a result of poor judgment for which Professor Wegman, as team leader, must bear responsibility. This also was a unanimous finding. As sanction, Professor Wegman has been asked to apologize to the journal involved, while retracting the article; and I am placing an official letter of reprimand in his file. Finally, because of the nature of the offense and its impact on the University, I am issuing this public statement. I believe that given the details in the committee report, these sanctions are appropriate to the nature and level of misconduct involved.

However, the work on the Congressional report did not constitute misconduct, according to Stearns’ letter: 

The committee investigating the congressional report has concluded that no scientific misconduct was involved. Extensive paraphrasing of another work did occur, in a background section, but the work was repeatedly referenced and the committee found that the paraphrasing did not constitute misconduct. This was a unanimous finding.

You can read more at USA Today, including comments from Bradley, who filed the complaint.

Something else in Stearns’ letter caught our eye. He writes:

While University actions to this point have been confidential, as our policy properly stipulates, the case has received wide publicity from other sources, however inappropriately. The University has been publicly criticized for its failure to render judgment and even for not caring much about the charges. While our procedure is indeed prolonged, in part because of federal requirements and in part to assure due process, any implication of lack of concern is entirely misplaced.

We are, of course, always pushing for universities to release the full results of their investigations, particularly when taxpayer dollars are involved, as they are here. So we’d urge George Mason to reconsider.

It’s worth looking at the actual rules that govern misconduct proceedings, however, something we’ve been meaning to do anyway. From our point of view, they’re a bit ambiguous. Here’s that section:

Sec.  93.108  Confidentiality.    

(a) Disclosure of the identity of respondents and complainants in research misconduct proceedings is limited, to the extent possible, to those who need to know, consistent with a thorough, competent, objective and fair research misconduct proceeding, and as allowed by law. Provided, however, that:   

(1) The institution must disclose the identity of respondents and complainants to ORI pursuant to an ORI review of research misconduct proceedings under Sec.  93.403.   

(2) Under Sec.  93.517(g), HHS administrative hearings must be open to the public.   

(b) Except as may otherwise be prescribed by applicable law, confidentiality must be maintained for any records or evidence from which research subjects might be identified. Disclosure is limited to those who have a need to know to carry out a research misconduct proceeding

Institutions that receive federal funding are required to submit what is known as an “assurance agreement,” which details how they will deal with misconduct allegations and investigations. When it comes to confidentiality, that agreement has to comply with the section above, at the very least. But how institutions define those who “need to know” is, by our read, left up to them. So if an institution doesn’t want to disclose much, which seems to be the case at George Mason, they can craft an assurance agreement that prohibits them from releasing their reports, and then call it a “federal requirement.”

Is that transparent? We’d welcome input from specialists in this area — it’s something we’ll be looking at more closely.

Hat tips: William Connolley, John Mashey, whose annotations of Stearns’ letter you can see here

Here’s the notice for the abstract, which has been cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:

Notice of Retraction: Invalid Study Design and Inability to Verify Results Due to Missing Data in “Pigtail Catheter Drainage of Transudative Pleural Effusions Hastens Liberation From Mechanical Ventilation [abstract]” (Chest. 2007;132[4]:455)

On discovering that data from the 2007 abstract published in CHEST “Pigtail Catheter Drainage of Transudative Pleural Effusions Hastens Liberation From Mechanical Ventilation [abstract]” (2007;132[4]:455) was utilized mistakenly in a more recent article published in CHEST: “Chest Tube Drainage of Transudative Pleural Effusions Hastens Liberation From Mechanical Ventilation” (2011;139[3]:519-523), Maimonides Medical Center, the institution at which both works were conducted, undertook a thorough investigation. As a result, it was discovered that the description of the study described in the 2007 abstract as a prospective randomized controlled trial was inaccurate. The randomization procedure employed was inconsistent with this study design. In addition, the data and research records associated with this study could not be located. Because of the seriousness of this methodological issue and the inability to locate the relevant data, we hereby retract this abstract. Further, the May 2011 article has been retracted under separate notice.

Said notice for the paper, which has only been cited by the retraction:

It was brought to our attention that the article “Chest Tube Drainage of Transudative Pleural Effusions Hastens Liberation From Mechanical Ventilation” published in the March issue of CHEST (2011;139[3]:519-523) used duplicate data from a 2007 abstract by several of the same authors: “Pigtail Catheter Drainage of Transudative Pleural Effusions Hastens Liberation From Mechanical Ventilation [abstract]” (2007;132[4]:455). After the authors acknowledged that the wrong data set was utilized in the creation of the May 2011 article, an investigation was undertaken by Maimonides Medical Center, the institution at which both works were conducted. The data intended for the May 2011 article was not located. Accordingly, due to its reliance on incorrect data, we hereby retract this article. Further, the 2007 abstract has been retracted under separate notice.

Maimonides gave us the following statement about the incident:

The editors of CHEST informed us that a reader had submitted a question about the data cited in the 2011 article; this prompted our internal investigation. Our findings were that an incorrect data set was used for the 2011 article, and we requested that CHEST retract that article. In addition, we requested that the 2006 abstract by several of the same authors be retracted to prevent reliance on those data for any further research effort. The researchers involved have and will continue to undergo extensive retraining on research study design and methodology. No federal funding was requested or received for either publication.

Yizhak Kupfer, associate director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Maimonides, told us that the problem was basically a dispute over the definition of randomization:

The  committee that reviewed the data felt that because we didn’t have a computerized generated randomization code, we shouldn’t have called it randomized.  We think that [it was properly randomized], but we had to go along with the committee’s [recommendation].

Kupfer said the 2011 article was retrospective and not intended to be randomized. That jibes with the description of the study on ClinicalTrials.gov, where it is listed as “Observational,” “Case Control” and “Retrospective.”

Kupfer blamed a “computer error” for the mixup with the data set for the 2007 abstract.

When we wrote it, unfortunately we used the wrong data set. Because of that mistake, we had to retract the later paper.

As part of the reeducation, Kupfer said his group has hired a research coordinator to police its efforts. What’s more, Kupfer said Chest has given his group a three-year publishing ban. Richard Irwin, the journal’s editor, declined to talk with us about the matter.

At least one website flagged the 2011 paper as problematic. PulmCCM.org had this to say last March:

Kupfer et al looked retrospectively at 168 vented patients with transudative pleural effusions at Maimonides in Brooklyn. The half that got chest tubes (with an average of 1,200 mL drained) spent 3.8 days on the vent, vs 6.5 days for the group that got only thoracentesis, with no complications reported. That’s interesting, but concluding and titling the paper “Chest Tube Drainage of Transudative Effusions Hastens Liberation from Mechanical Ventilation” without a randomized trial seems a bit, well, hasty.

In an editorial published in the journal’s January issue, Thomas Berquist notes:

Preliminary data including all article types accepted by AJR show that the amount of duplication varies significantly with different article types. For example, duplication in Original Research articles may be up to 58% and in Memorials, 23%. That is not to say that all duplications are significant or deliberate. For example, most computer software packages pick up words that are the same in a given sentence, pulse sequences that vary with vendors, and other similarities that may be appropriately referenced or quoted.

The ORI, Berquist notes, “has reported that up to 25% of their misconduct allegations involve plagiarism.” So how can authors avoid it?

Start by reading the guidelines, he writes, from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and each journal to which you’re submitting. And it’s OK to paraphrase or summarize someone else’s work, as long as you quote or footnote:

The corresponding author has the ultimate responsibility to be certain that all coauthors have used the appropriate citations and procedures. There are appropriate methods for paraphrasing or summarizing someone else’s work. These have been summarized by K. Shashok [11]. When this cannot be accomplished, one should use quotations or footnotes. For example, “correct citation and accurate referencing of sources are effective ways to prevent unintentional plagiarism,” as stated by K. Shashok in reference 10 of this editorial. I quoted this work directly and placed it in quotation marks with reference to the author by name and reference number. Using quotation marks is double protection and should be accomplished when statements are taken verbatim from another work. Manuscript reviewers will appreciate this honest approach with appropriate credit for the other author’s work. Permission from the original publisher is required if multiple paragraphs are quoted from another’s research work. One must always acknowledge someone else’s work even if it is paraphrased. Finally, if there are any concerns about previously published content, they should be noted in the cover letter to the editor when submitting the manuscript to the journal [9].

These seem like eminently sensible suggestions, although we should note that in different settings, fair use provisions mean permission is not always required.

If authors are found to have plagiarized, there are serious consequences:

Depending on the level of concern and the explanation, the allegations may be dropped and the authors warned to be aware of the potential misconduct when submitting future manuscripts to AJR or any journal. If the authors’ responses are not deemed satisfactory, an independent panel is selected to review the allegations. If the allegations are confirmed, the authors’ institutions are brought into the picture. In several cases we have required an organized remediation of an entire department with documentation of their process and outcomes. The worst-case scenario is multiyear sanctions that prevent the authors from submitting manuscripts for publication. To date, this has not been necessary during my tenure as Editor in Chief.

arXiv, the preprint server, has another good lesson in what happens when authors don’t follow the steps described in the AJR. Take a look at this paper, “Libertarian free will and quantum indeterminism,” submitted earlier this week. The comment field reads:

Comments: 11 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1011.4898

A search for “text overlap” on arXiv reveals more than 600 cases of such notes. Think those papers have a good chance of being published?

Hat tips: Clare Francis, David Anderson

The development, first reported by Duke Check, follows a 60 Minutes segment last week focused on Potti and Duke. Duke Check also noted that a Myrtle Beach PR firm had promised a statement later today.

We called the oncology practice, who refered us to LHWH Advertising and Public Relations of Myrtle Beach. The PR firm tells us we’ll be getting a statement at about 2 p.m. Eastern, so check back here.

Update, 2:30 p.m. Eastern: Here’s the statement (our comments below):

Coastal Cancer Center Of Myrtle Beach Ends Relationship With Dr. Anil Potti
Letters Of Recommendation From Duke Were Key Factors In Original Hiring Decision

February 21, 2012, Myrtle Beach, S.C. – Dr. Anil Potti, MD is no longer associated with Coastal Cancer Center of Myrtle Beach, S.C. Dr. Potti, who saw patients primarily at Coastal Cancer Center’s Loris, S.C. and Brunswick County, N.C. facilities, served his final day on Feb. 21st. Potti originally joined Coastal Cancer Center as an oncologist in March 2011.

“A recent 60 Minutes story concerning an investigation of Duke University’s cancer research programs and Dr. Potti’s work there prompted many concerned people to contact Coastal Cancer Center with comments and questions,” said Lawrence B. Holt, Jr., MD, FACP, President of Coastal Cancer Center. “It has become obvious that this issue is going to take precious focus away from patient care. Coastal Cancer Center is staffed by incredibly caring people who want and need to concentrate on providing outstanding patient care.” 

Coastal Cancer Center conducted a deep and thorough investigation of Potti’s credentials before hiring him. Potti received numerous letters of strong recommendation from key members of the medical community at Duke University where Potti had worked before coming to the Grand Strand.

“We received glowing references about Dr. Potti’s character and skills from the highest ranks of the Duke University School of Medicine and Duke University Medical Center,” said Holt. “We were assured by Duke Medical’s leaders that Anil was ‘outstanding in all categories,’ ‘had excellent clinical skills’ and that he had conducted himself at Duke with ‘honesty, integrity and humility.’ One Duke University director even went so far as to say he would be pleased to have Dr. Potti as the treating physician ‘if my own family had unfortunately contracted a cancer.’ Letters of recommendation came in from the chief of Duke Medical’s Division of Medical Oncology, the Chair of the Department of Medicine, the Director of Hematologic Malignancies Program, and several professors. 

“During the time that Dr. Potti has been with us,” continued Holt, “he has been an exemplary physician whose caring ways have made him extremely popular with patients. We will miss him.”

During his time on staff at Coastal Cancer Center, Dr. Potti became an active part of the Grand Strand medical community, many of whom have reached out to him in the days since the 60 Minutes story aired. 

“We have been touched and heartened by the outpouring of support for Anil that has come from the local medical community,” says Holt. “Like those of us at the Cancer Center, other physicians recognize him as an exceptional doctor and colleague.”

Dr. Holt and other Coastal Cancer Center physicians will personally assume the care of of Dr. Potti’s patients. 

More information about Coastal Cancer Center is available online at http://coastalcancercenter.com.

Like many aspects of the Potti case, this statement is mind-boggling. The attempt to pin the blame on others — in this case, singling out a Duke official who, the release neglects to mention, has expressed regret at recommending Potti so highly — is par for the course in the whole Potti affair. This, of course, while claiming to have conducted a “deep and thorough investigation of Potti’s credentials.”

Really? Someone should make sure the Coastal Cancer Center has a subscription to The Cancer Letter. Wouldn’t hurt if they kept up with Retraction Watch, either.

Alzheimer’s & Dementia

The author is Caroline Rodgers, a self-described “independent writer/researcher who investigates public health issues and advocates for change.” Although we can’t find the text, we’re guessing that its premise is similar to that of her 2011 paper in Medical Hypotheses, titled “Dental X-ray exposure and Alzheimer’s disease: a hypothetical etiological association.”

Here’s the abstract from that paper:

Despite the fact that Alzheimer’s disease was identified more than 100 years ago, its cause remains elusive. Although the chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease increases with age, it is not a natural consequence of aging. This article proposes that dental X-rays can damage microglia telomeres – the structures at the end of chromosomes that determine how many times cells divide before they die – causing them to age prematurely. Degenerated microglia lose their neuroprotective properties, resulting in the formation of neurofibrillary tau tangles and consequently, the neuronal death that causes Alzheimer’s dementia. The hypothesis that Alzheimer’s is caused specifically by microglia telomere damage would explain the delay of one decade or longer between the presence of Alzheimer’s brain pathology and symptoms; telomere damage would not cause any change in microglial function, it would just reset the countdown clock so that senescence and apoptosis occurred earlier than they would have without the environmental insult. Once microglia telomere damage causes premature aging and death, the adjacent neurons are deprived of the physical support, maintenance and nourishment they require to survive. This sequence of events would explain why therapies and vaccines that eliminate amyloid plaques have been unsuccessful in stopping dementia. Regardless of whether clearing plaques is beneficial or harmful – which remains a subject of debate – it does not address the failing microglia population. If microglia telomere damage is causing Alzheimer’s disease, self-donated bone marrow or dental pulp stem cell transplants could give rise to new microglia populations that would maintain neuronal health while the original resident microglia population died.

Rodgers, who goes by the blog handle “Science Siren,”  submitted public testimony in support of her theory at a meeting last month of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Advisory Council on Alzheimer’s Research. Her take-home message:

It is not realistic to believe that decades of dental X-ray exposure would be without consequence for all people. The question is not, “Why should we consider whether dental X-rays are causing Alzheimer’s,” but rather, “Why didn’t we think of this sooner?”

Rodgers told us that she presented the poster last July at a meeting in Paris of the Alzheimer’s Association.

The abstract was not included in the Journal’s special supplement of conference abstracts, which is why it is being published in the main journal in March.

And she said the withdrawal was not a retraction — the published abstract will be forthcoming. An official at Elsevier, which publishes Alzheimer’s & Dementia, informed her that the abstract

was withdrawn as an “article in press” because it was an abstract for a poster session, not a full article. He said, “We specifically did not use the word ‘retracted’ because we did not want to indicate there was anything wrong with it.”  The abstract will be published in the March issue, as planned.

We confirmed that with Elsevier, and learned that the problem arose from a misclassification of the abstract in the editorial office of the journal.

Rodgers hasn’t limited her research to the causes of Alzheimer’s disease. Another area of interest for her is an alleged link between autism and exposure to prenatal ultrasound:

If prenatal ultrasound is the primary reason siblings of children with autism are at higher risk for being diagnosed with ASD, it would explain why previous sibling studies did not show as high a sibling risk: as ultrasound’s potential acoustic output, applications and occasions have increased, so has the risk.

And we might expect even more theories from her. After all, as she notes on her blog:

I have developed original ideas regarding the part that heat plays in everything from the onset of labor to the location of body hair to the roller coaster of circadian rhythms we experience every day.

Most exciting is how these conjectures, if proven true, can have a beneficial impact on public health.

According to the notice:

It has recently come to our attention that clinical information from a data set CALGB 9761 (GSE3593), available at the time of the signature development, was incorrect. Since survival data from this data set were integral to the creation of this signature, this makes the findings of this manuscript inaccurate. Drs. Anil Potti and Marvaretta Stevenson take full responsibility for this error. Therefore, we would like to formally retract the above paper.

The study has been cited five times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

All of the authors signed the notice. Potti and Stevenson, who took responsibility for the retraction, together published Potti’s only paper to have appeared since Potti’s resignation from Duke. Stevenson is still a faculty member at the university.

You can keep up with all of the retractions and corrections here.

Consider this retraction notice for ”Estimation of failure probability in water pipes network using statistical model,” originally published in February 2011 in Engineering Failure Analysis:

This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as it is a duplicate of a paper that has already been published in World Appl. Sci. J., 11 (2010) 1157–1163, “Estimation of Failure Probability in Water Pipes Network Using Statistical Model”, M.J. Fadaee and R. Tabatabaei. The authors have stated that they decided to withdraw it from World Applied Sciences Journal after its acceptance and instead submit it to Engineering Failure Analysis. However, their article was still published in World Applied Sciences Journal despite their request to the contrary. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly and confirm that the paper is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

The now-retracted paper has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the World Applied Sciences Journal version. [See update at end.]

We’ve tried to contact the authors for comment, and will update with anything we hear back.

We can see how they would have wanted to publish in Engineering Failure Analysis — which ranks in about the 40th percentile of impact factors in its two Thomson Scientific categories, “mechanical engineering” and “materials science, characterization, and testing”  — instead of in the World Applied Sciences Journal, which isn’t ranked by Thomson Scientific at all. But it’s generally a good idea to make sure you aren’t actually publishing in your second choice before you go to your first choice.

You might call this a failure.

Update, 4:30 p.m. Eastern, 2/21/12: The World Applied Sciences Journal site has been suspended. We’re trying to figure out why, and will update with anything we find out.

Update, 4:45 p.m. Eastern, 2/24/12: The journal’s site appears to be back online.

Hat tip: Clare Francis

The article, “Dynamic behavior of polymers at high strain-rates based on split Hopkinson pressure bar tests,” was published online last November by a pair of researchers from the U.K. and China. As the notice states:

This article has been retracted at the request of the editors and authors. The authors realised recently that the FE model used in the paper is different from that shown in Figure 4 of the paper. The calculations were mistakenly undertaken using an axisymmetric FE model of a tube for the solid SHPB specimen. The authors examined the possible consequences of this mistake. The recalculation of Figure 9 indicates that the transition strain-rate predicted from the correct model has not been observed up to 10⁴ 1/s, which is two orders higher than the transition strain-rate predicted by the wrong model (in the order of 102 1/s). Since the strain-rate of 104 1/s is already outside the testing range of conventional SHPB set-ups, the authors can no longer draw the conclusion that there is considerable lateral confinement contribution to the testing data from conventional SHPB tests on polymers when the strain-rate is greater than 10² 1/s, which completely undermines the conclusion of the study. The authors apologise for misleading any readers due to this unfortunate mistake.

Unfortunate, indeed.

What’s not clear from the notice, however, is what that wayward figure — the one upon which the whole paper evidently rested — was doing in the paper.

courtesy Nature

Have you seen this correction, from the September 8, 2011 issue of Nature, for “Tumour vascularization via endothelial differentiation of glioblastoma stem-like cells?”

The figures and Supplementary figures of this Letter are affected by errors and improper editing. The correct figures are now provided, with an explanation of the variations. The original Letter has not been corrected online. We apologise for the confusion that our errors could have produced. We admit our negligence in the supervision of technical activity. We acknowledge that image manipulation is not acceptable and that any image modification must be clearly described. None of the alterations have any direct impact on the validity of our conclusions, which were also substantially confirmed in papers published by other independent groups^{1, 2}.

In Fig. 1b, the left panel was generated by joining different fields acquired from several pictures in which the density of nuclei was very low. This was not apparent in the original figure because no border limits the individual acquisitions. This does not affect the interpretation of the results, which was based on the direct observation of a large number of cell nuclei by a senior investigator that gave the frequency of euploid versus aneuploid cells in each case preparation. The figure is only intended to show the appearance of different patterns. The same correction has been made in the right panel. Figure 1b, now showing the eight separate images, is corrected below. The master pictures of the figure are available as Supplementary Figs 1 and 2 of this Corrigendum. In Fig. 1c, two parts of the same picture were cut, flipped and moved closer to save space in the figure. However, the upper and lower panels of Fig. 1c partially overlapped. In Fig. 2b, the panel showing the uptake of LDL by HMVEC (bottom image only) erroneously showed a duplication of the GBM patient panel. The HMVEC panel of Fig. 2b is corrected below.

The massive correction, which Karin Wiebauer brought to our attention, includes the corrected figures, and continues in the Supplementary Information. The original paper, published in late 2010, has been cited 69 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. An earlier Nature paper by many of the same authors has been cited more than 1,000 times.

We’ve been keeping an eye on these “mega-corrections,” and in our latest column for Lab Times, we ask whether they’re the best way to go. As we note, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has this to say about retractions vs. corrections:

journals “should consider issuing a correction if: a small portion of an otherwise reliable publication proves to be misleading (especially because of honest error)” or “the author / contributor list is incorrect (i.e. a deserving author has been omitted or somebody who does not meet authorship criteria has been included).” Retractions, say the guidelines, require “clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).”

We look forward to hearing what Retraction Watch readers think.