The abstract of the article,”Proton-pumping-ATPase-targeted antifungal activity of cinnamaldehyde based sulfonyl tetrazoles,” is still available on Medline:

Here’s what the abstract of the paper said about the study:

Azoles are generally fungistatic, and resistance to fluconazole is emerging in several fungal pathogens. We designed a series of cinnamaldehyde based sulfonyl tetrazole derivatives. To further explore the antifungal activity, in vitro studies were conducted against 60 clinical isolates and 6 standard laboratory strains of Candida. The rapid irreversible action of these compounds on fungal cells suggested a membrane-located target for their action. Results obtained indicate plasma membrane H(+)-ATPase as site of action of the synthesized compounds. Inhibition of H(+)-ATPase leads to intracellular acidification and cell death. Presence of chloro and nitro groups on the sulfonyl pendant has been demonstrated to be a key structural element of antifungal potency. SEM micrographs of treated Candida cells showed severe cell breakage and alterations in morphology.

But the analysis seems to have suffered a fatal flaw or two, although the precise nature of those glitches isn’t clear from the retraction statement:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors.

The authors have retracted this article because of errors relating to molecule characterization reported in the text. The authors express their sincere apologies for this oversight.

We’re guessing that faulty “molecular characterization” rises above, say, that involved in slipping on black ice or adding a tablespoon of salt in a recipe that calls instead for sugar. But is it fair to assume that what the authors are trying to say is that their “series of cinnamaldehyde based sulfonyl tetrazole derivatives” was not, in fact, those substances? If so, that would seem like a pretty monumental mischaracterization, yes?

We’ve contacted the corresponding author of the paper, and will update with anything we find out.

Paul Pronyk, who until last week was director of monitoring and evaluation at Columbia University’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development, which runs the Millennium Villages Project, wrote a letter to the Lancet acknowledging errors in the paper, “The effect of an integrated multisector model for achieving the Millennium Development Goals and improving child survival in rural sub-Saharan Africa: a non-randomised controlled assessment,” originally published May 8. That admission came after Jesse Bump, Michael Clemens, Gabriel Demombynes, and Lawrence Haddad wrote a letter criticizing the work, which was published this week accompanied by corrections to the paper:

Some changes have been made to this Article (see accompanying Correspondence). In the Summary, the last sentence of the Background section should have read “…and compare these changes to local reference data”; the third last sentence of the Methods section should have read “To assess plausibility and attribution, we compared changes to reference data gathered from matched randomly selected comparison sites for the mortality rate of children younger than 5 years of age”; the last sentence of the Findings section has been deleted; and the Interpretation section should have read “An integrated multisector approach for addressing the MDGs can produce rapid declines in child mortality in the first 3 years of a long-term eff ort in rural sub-Saharan Africa”.

In the Introduction, the last sentence should have read “…and compare these changes to local trends”. In the Methods under the heading Procedures, the last sentence of the fourth paragraph has been deleted, and the second sentence of the sixth paragraph should have read “Smears were read by experienced microscopists in local laboratories at baseline and in a research laboratory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in year 3, using best practice techniques”. In the Results, the second sentence of the third paragraph section should have read “The mortality rates in children younger than 5 years of age before the intervention were higher in the Millennium Villages than in the comparison villages (p=0·020; table 1)”; the seventh sentence of the fi fth paragraph has been deleted; and the final paragraph has been deleted.

In the Discussion, the final sentence of the first paragraph has been deleted; and the second sentence of the fourth paragraph should have read “As random site selection across multiple countries was not feasible, we used a pair-matched design to better understand causality and attribution”. The corresponding author has been changed to Prof Jeffery D Sachs, and the Role of the Funding Source statement has been amended to read “PMP had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication”. The appendix of this Article has been corrected. These changes have been made as of May 21, 2012.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Millennium Villages Project, tells Retraction Watch that the team’s oversight will be overhauled:

The criticisms from Demombynes and Clemens regarding this timing issue have been on point and helpful.  While the progress in the Millennium Villages has been notable, an accurate comparison with local, regional, and national trends in comparable periods is essential.  In response to the valuable criticisms, and more generally in order to strengthen the project, I am leading an overhaul of the research organization of the project, including the creation of an independent expert group chaired by Prof. Robert Black (Chair of International Health at Hopkins) to scrutinize, assess, and help to improve the data collection, processing, and analysis.  Dr. Paul Pronyk has left the project, and I will co-chair a new faculty research committee with Dr. Cheryl Palm.  This new faculty research committee will be the counterpart of the independent expert group.

This is not the first time the group’s work has been questioned. Two of the authors of the Lancet critique also wrote a letter to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to criticize a paper published last year in that journal. The issues were similar, but what really caught our eye in the letter was what the authors said was a lack of transparency on the part of the Millennium authors:

[T]he article’s calculations—arrived at through multiple layers of reweighting and matching—cannot be independently checked or replicated by other researchers because the data are strictly internal to the project. Authors of the study informed us that the data will be unavailable to outside researchers until several years in the future, even though results based on those data have already been published in this and other peer-reviewed journals.

The group responded to the criticisms by doing another analysis of their findings, but not issuing a correction. They had this to say about data access:

[T]he project adheres to the requirements of scientific journals in which it is published and the oversight of 11 institutional review boards. We are currently midway through a 10-y evaluation. Survey tools are publically available, indicator definitions are clearly presented, and methods for statistical testing are outlined in detail. Peer reviewers often request additional analyses that may or may not appear in the manuscript or its appendices, and they may request primary data in some instances. Challenges associated with making primary research data widely available have been commented on previously (11). This should be distinguished from secondary analyses of public data sets such as the DHS (supplemental Appendix in the online issue of our article).

Sachs responded promptly to a Retraction Watch request for comment on why the Lancet paper required a correction, while the AJCN paper didn’t. Calling the criticisms “on point and helpful,” Sachs tells us:

Demombynes and Clemens were correct in both cases (AJCN and Lancet) that the outcomes in the Millennium Villages should be compared with national trends during comparable time periods.  Using a longer time period for the national data understates the recent national advances.  In the case of stunting, sad to say, the recent national advances have not been so fast (the acceleration of national progress has been modest in a number of places).  In the case of under-5 mortality, the recent national advances have more generally and fortunately been much faster.  I think that AJCN letters and the correction of the Lancet paper are clear in both regards.

Hat tip: Ranit Mishori

Consider the case of a group of researchers in China led by Tan Jinquan, an immune system expert at Wuhan University. Over the past two years or so, Jinquan and colleagues have lost no fewer than a half-dozen papers containing evidence of image manipulation. But, depending on the journal pulling the articles, you might not know it.

We learned, but did not first hear, about the problems with Jinquan’s papers (note: he seems to be the senior author, and we have no evidence that he was anything more than a bystander in any fabrication) by reading a retraction notice from the June 2011 issue of the American Journal of Transplantation:

The following article from American Journal of Transplantation 2008; 8: 1401–1412, doi: 10.1111/j.1600-6143.2008.02275.x, Essential Role of Sphingosine-1-Phosphate Receptor 1-Bearing CD8+CD44+CCR7+ T Cells in Acute Skin Allograft Rejection, by H. Yuling, X. Ruijing, J. Xiang, X. Luokun, Y. Wenjun, C. Feng, H. Baojun, Y. Hui, Y. Guang, Y. Chunlei, Z. Jixin, C. Lang, Q. Li, A. Chang, B. Zhuan, J. Youxin, G. Feili, T. Jinquan, published online on June 28, 2008 in Wiley Online Library (http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Allan D. Kirk, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed upon due to concerns relating to the data contained in Figures 1 and 7. The authors, upon presentation with the figures in question, were unable to satisfactorily regenerate the data or explain the areas in question.

Then we found this notice, from PLoS Pathogens, for a 2010 paper titled “EBV Promotes Human CD8+ NKT Cell Development”:

After an internal investigation by the Wuhan University Academic Ethics Committee, the authors of this paper requested that it be retracted. Several of the dataplots in Figure 8 contain regions that appeared to be identical, and concerns have been raised about other figures. The internal investigation could not account for the apparent duplications within Figure 8 and so the provenance and accuracy of these, and potentially other, figures cannot therefore be guaranteed. As a result, the overall integrity of this work is uncertain, and the paper was retracted from PLoS Pathogens on 03 Dec 2010.

So far, so good — at least, if good is the transparent communication of relevant information to readers and the community of scientists.

But we were disappointed to see several more retraction notices involving Jinquan’s papers that, for whatever reason, said nothing of value. Indeed, two of these were what we might call the index cases that got us interested in the matter, but which, as will become clear in a moment, required some dot-connecting that most readers wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to pursue.

Two of the retractions involved the journal Oncogene, a Nature Publishing Group title. The first of these, from 2011, refers to a 2005 paper (with a 2004 online pub date), “Selectively frequent expression of CXCR5 enhances resistance to apoptosis in CD8+CD34+ T cells from patients with T-cell-lineage acute lymphocytic leukemia.”

The blindingly illuminating notice:

This paper has been retracted.

The second Oncogene notice, for the 2007 article “Androgen activates PEG10 to promote carcinogenesis in hepatic cancer cells,” which also appeared in 2011, is equally revealing:

This paper has been retracted.

Not to be outdone, the Journal of Immunology has retracted two Jinquan papers with a rhetorical reserve that would make the Stoics nod in approval. Here’s one in the June 2012 issue, for a 2005 article titled “CD226 Expression Deficiency Causes High Sensitivity to Apoptosis in NK T Cells from Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus”:

We wish to retract the article titled “CD226 Expression Deficiency Causes High Sensitivity to Apoptosis in NK T Cells from Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus” by Deng Tao, Liu Shangwu, Wu Qun, Liu Yan, Ju Wei, Liu Junyan, Gong Feili, Jin Boquan, and Tan Jinquan, The Journal of Immunology, 2005, 174: 1281–1290.

Also in its June 2012 issue, the journal has retracted a 2005 paper by the group with the following notice:

We wish to retract the article titled “Vα24-Invariant NKT Cells from Patients with Allergic Asthma Express CCR9 at High Frequency and Induce Th2 Bias of CD3⁺ T Cells upon CD226 Engagement” by Yang Sen, Bi Yongyi, He Yuling, Xie Luokun, He Li, Xiong Jie, Deng Tao, Zhou Gang, Liu Junyan, Hu Chunsong, Xuejun Zhang, Jin Youxin, Gong Feili, Jin Boquan, and Tan Jinquan, The Journal of Immunology, 2005, 175: 4914–4926.

In addition to being functionally useless as retraction notices — who, for example, is “We?”, the authors? the editors?; are bad images the reason? — both of them were behind a paywall when we first saw them. After we contacted the journal, which is published by the American Association of Immunologists, the statements moved to a more accessible location.

We attempted to contact the JI‘s editor, Jeremy Boss, to find out why the notices were so uninformative. So far, no reply.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been able to take advantage of a sort of natural experiment to see how various journals dealt with retractions due to the same cause, and found some of the notices wanting. That was the case in the Silvia Bulfone-Paus series of retractions, too.

In fairness to the JI, it does not appear to be, ahem, allergic to informative retraction notices — at least in its past. A search of the archives turns up several examples of statements that say quite a bit about the problems with the affected papers.

For example, this 2010 notice is a reasonable exposition on the travails of a 2003 article:

We wish to retract the article titled “Neutrophil Serine Proteinases Activate Human Nonepithelial Cells to Produce Inflammatory Cytokines Through Protease-Activated Receptor 2,” by Akiko Uehara, Koji Muramoto, Haruhiko Takada, and Shunji Sugawara, The Journal of Immunology, 2003, 170: 5690–5696.

This retraction follows an investigation by Tohoku University into scientific misconduct. The investigation pointed out the following:

1. Figs. 1B and 2A: Total RNA was extracted from different cells, and cDNA was prepared and analyzed for the expression of SLPI and PARs and GAPDH by RT-PCR. However, the patterns of GAPDH in these figures and those in the figures of The Journal of Immunology, 2002, 169: 4594–4603 and in Fig. 2A of Clinical and Diagnostic Laboratory Immunology, 2003, 10: 286–292 are the same.

2. Fig. 2B: Two panels of the expression of PAR-2 with HLE and Cat G are the same.

The first author, who conducted these experiments, could not counter the argument by adducing raw data at the investigation, and the investigation recognized them as scientific misconduct. Therefore, we wish to retract the article.

We deeply regret these errors and apologize to the scientific community for the need to retract the article.

And the JI in 2011 retracted a 2006 paper whose authors had ordered the wrong batch of mice, and told readers about it.

We’re hopeful that the most recent bursts of indifference are simply an oversight and not a reversion to a less communicative adolescence.

Immunity has now run a retraction involving van Parijs, dated May 25, 2012, for 2003′s “Autoimmunity as the Consequence of a Spontaneous Mutation in Rasgrp1″:

(Immunity 19, 243–255; August 2003)

The authors have agreed to retract the paper because of the falsification of the Western blot in Figure 6A. The figure shows a defect in Ras activation, labeled as RasGTP, following TCR engagement, in thymocytes isolated from a RasGRP1 lag mutant mouse strain. This data set is one of several that show signaling and functional deficiencies identified for cells with lost of function of RasGRP. The authors stand by the validity of the other figures, results, and interpretation in this paper. This matter was investigated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Office of Research Integrity at the United States Department of Health & Human Services, which found that the figure was falsified by Luk Van Parijs, who is solely responsible. The authors deeply regret any inconvenience resulting from the publication of this data.

The paper has been cited 44 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. But it was among those cited by the Office of Research Integrity in its 2009 findings about the van Parijs case:

While at MIT, Dr. Luk Van Parijs falsified figures in grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a presentation in 2003, and Figure 6A, Immunity 19:243-255 (2003), by falsely claiming that the image in the figure represented an immunoprecipitation assay for Ras-GTP and a Western blot for total Ras protein, when it actually represented a Western blot for Bcl-2 and [beta]-actin in T cells, previously published as Figure 5C, J. Immunol., 168:597-603 (2002).

It’s not clear why the retraction is just appearing now, nor why it took more than three years for the authors to agree to withdraw the paper. We’ve asked the corresponding author for comment, and will update with anything we find out.

By our count, it’s the fifth retraction for van Parijs, who was sentenced last year to six months of house arrest.

Hat tip: @biochembelle

Post written by contributor Trevor Stokes

Improperly aligned columns have cost researchers at the Mayo Clinic a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The paper originally concluded that fainting spells (syncope) give patients with high blood pressure in their lung arteries poor prognoses, an observation that turned out to be incorrect.

The problem? The group merged two electronic databases, but did not align columns properly, a problem found only after first author Rachel Le revisited the dataset looking to cull more data.

The retraction notice published on May 22 (the one on ScienceDirect is free to air, while the one on the JACC site is behind a paywall):

Syncope in Adults With Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. J Am Coll Cardiol 59 (2011) 863–7.

Rachel J. Le, MD, Eric R. Fenstad, MD, Hilal Maradit-Kremers, MD, Robert B. McCully, MD, Robert P. Frantz, MD, Michael D. McGoon, MD, Garvan C. Kane, MD, P HD.

Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota; and the Department of Health Sciences Research, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.

Available online August 8, 2011.

Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the authors, because of a data entry error, which is fundamental to the study findings. As background, this was a clinical study where a specific variable was tested in a large database. The process involved merging a variable (presence or absence of syncope) from one electronic source with an alternate electronic database of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension and assessing associations and outcomes. In proceeding to design a follow-up study to this work, Dr. Le went back to the original source file to abstract new data. In doing this she identified a ‘cut-and paste’ error in which the column of syncope data was transferred incorrectly where syncope/no syncope variables were assigned to wrong subjects. This led to a critical error that then got carried forward and a fundamental misclassification of syncope in the final study group. This error fundamentally affects the results, which now do not fully support the conclusions.

The paper has been cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’ve tried to contact Le and Kane for more information, and will update with anything we find out.

The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, like many journals, struggles with limited resources that allow errors to pass through, according to an April 17 editorial from Anthony N. DeMaria, the journal’s editor-in-chief. In “Scientific Misconduct, Retractions, and Errata”, DeMaria wrote:

If we can believe that over 10% of investigators are aware of scientific misconduct, either we as editors have been extraordinarily discerning of such transgressions during the review process, or we have occasionally been duped. This perhaps would not be surprising given the limited arsenal available to us to identify misconduct.

Kane’s group voluntarily came forward to admit their errors, and there was no misconduct reported.

The retraction also puts into question an abstract published in 2010 in Chest that had a similar conclusion to that of the JACC paper:

In a broad spectrum of clinical PAH patients, syncope is infrequent, associated with markers of right heart dysfunction and is strongly and independently predictive of poor outcome.

Cardiology Today featured the research on April 18, 2011 during its coverage of the The International Society for Heart & Lung Transplantation 31st annual meeting and scientific sessions. They quoted Le:

Presyncope/syncope is associated with markers of increased disease severity in newly diagnosed PAH patients. However, it was not predictive of unadjusted survival.

James Young, a Cardiology Today section editor, wrote a brief editorial to accompany the online article:

To me, the interesting aspect of this data was validation of something that has been repeatedly mentioned by astute clinicians of yesteryear: the relationship of presyncope and syncope to severity of PAH. It was an elegant analysis of an important registry and raises the question of a pathophysiologic link of syncope/presyncope to worsening PAH and not just something that is a consequence of PAH.

The team has now retracted three more papers:

• “Strong limit on Δα/α from the analysis of feII absorp-tion line multiplets,” from Natural Science
• “New test for cosmological time variation of thefine-structure constant from the analysis of quasarspectra,” also from Natural Science
•  ”Studying Cosmological Time Variability of the Fine-Structure Constant from the Analysis of Quasar Spectra,” from Journal of Modern Physics

The notices all read the same way, with the last sentence changed to refer to the study in question:

The article has been retracted due to the investigation of complaints received against it. The substantial portions of the text came from Le Duc Thong’s former article, “New method of searching for cos-mological time variation of the fine-structure constant”, which has also been retraced by Prog. Theor. Phys. because of plagiarism. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we treat all unethical behavior such as plagiarism seriously. This paper published in Vol.2 No.6 533-537, 2011, has been removed from this site.

That brings the total to seven, which our math-0riented physicist readers probably worked out on their own.

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:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief as it is a duplicate of a paper that has already been published in J. Mater. Process. Technol., 189 (2007) 132–137, doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2007.01.014. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that the paper is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. 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.

Not much to say about this, although we’d love to hear a convincing explanation for how two completely identical papers from the same research team might make it into print in less time than it normally takes a single paper to be reviewed, accepted and published. We’re also curious why the notice was silent on the authorship issue.

We posed those questions to A. Erman Tekkaya, one of two editors-in-chief of the JMPT. He told us that the publication had recently undergone a change in editors, which, we suppose, might have generated enough discontinuity to allow for such a mix-up. But Tekkaya did not address the authorship issue, which we think might be interesting. An email to one of the missing co-authors bounced back as undeliverable.

We also attempted to contact the papers’ first author, Renaud Metz, who has a lab at the University of Montpellier. A PDF of the second paper states that it was initially accepted in August 2006, received in revised form in April 2007 and accepted in May 2007. For the initial publication, the dates are received March 2006, revision received in December 2006 and accepted in mid-January 2007.

Now, it’s easy to chalk all this up to administrative error, poor organization or the like. But that doesn’t explain one thing: Metz’ online CV lists both versions of the JMPT article! Metz did not immediately return an email seeking comment on the retraction.

Fujii has responded to the journal with an equally startling (for different reasons, of course) rebuttal. We received permission from Steve Yentis, Anaesthesia‘s editor, to reprint the letter in its entirely. We present it here, and strongly recommend that readers take a look at the journal’s website to read the piece that prompted Fujii’s response:

I seriously read the Special Article by Dr Carlisle [1]. As is well known, Dr. Carlisle is interested in the area of peri-operative medicine [2]. Similarly, I am interested in this area and have made efforts to improve the postoperative outcomes of surgical patients. Additionally, we have provided information on diaphragm muscle dysfunction and its improvement in animal studies. However, this article by Carlisle can obviously be very damaging to me and I want to answer it seriously, but I am not a statistician. I can only offer a few elements of rebuttal at this point.

Postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) remains a common complication for surgical patients. In addition to patients’ discomfort, the physical act of vomiting may increase the risk of aspiration, wound dehiscence, and delayed recovery and discharge times [3]. For the management of PONV in high-risk patients, we have evaluated the efficacy and safety of antiemetics, including serotonin receptor antagonists, droperidol, metoclopramide and others, as first reported by us in 1994 [4]. Factors affecting PONV include patients’ characteristics, surgical procedure, anaesthetic technique and postoperative care [3]. Patient-related factors associated with increased PONV include age, female sex, obesity, a history of motion sickness and/or previous PONV, and menstruation. Increasing age during adulthood is associated with a decreased incidence of PONV. Considering these factors, most reports by us have excluded patients aged over 60 years, those who were obese, those with a history of motion sickness and/or previous PONV, and those who were menstruating. Being different from European and American nations, most Japanese people are middle-sized. Consequently, patients’ characteristics would be comparable in our series of clinical investigations. In addition, middle-aged Japanese women suffer from specific diseases, such as uterine myoma, breast cancer and goitre. Difference in diet, level of stress, etc can certainly produce a bizarre distribution of data specific to Japanese people. We cannot select the patients of our studies as broadly as we would want to.

As described in Kranke et al.’s letter and my response [5], granisetron, classified as a serotonin receptor antagonist, lacks the sedative, dysphoric and extrapyramidal symptoms associated with non-serotonin receptor antagonists. It is known that mild headache is one of the adverse effects in patients receiving granisetron. As mentioned in our published articles, trained nurses asked the patients about their conditions postoperatively. According to these results, in our manuscripts, its incidence was verified as approximately 10%. The researchers asked the patients if they experienced headache, dizziness and drowsiness, with only two possible answers (yes/no). This assessment might have caused the identical results regarding the incidence of postoperative adverse events. When analysing the degree of headache in detail, different results may have been obtained.

The diaphragm is the most important muscle in the respiratory pump. Since publishing our first laboratory report [6], we have studied the effects of several drugs, such as phospodiesterase-3 inhibitors, calcium channel blockades, benzodiazepines, and others, on diaphragmatic contractility in animals. All measurements (including haemodynamics, blood gas tensions, trans-diaphragmatic pressure and integrated activity of the diaphragm) and analyses of data obtained from the experiments were performed by myself and colleagues (co-authors), and this can be proved by them.

I understand that the tests by Dr. Carlisle are designed to uncover statistical anomalies based on very few assumptions about the data. I am not qualified to counter specific allegations concerning the ‘central limit theorem’ and its applicability in our case. As I said, our data sample is very special, but I do not have the skills to examine in detail if it has an impact on Carlisle’s analyses.

Finally, since the critical report against me by Kranke et al. was published in 2000, I have greatly suffered. Nevertheless, I have continued my clinical and laboratory studies with great care. In addition, there has been confusion concerning the ethical procedures at Ushiku Aiwa General Hospital where I did clinical research. This hospital did not have a formal institutional ethics committee, and therefore I sought and obtained the approval of the Vice-Chairman. Later, while at Toho University School of Medicine, I was unfairly blamed for Ushiku’s informal procedures. As a result of a lack of ethical approval, I received the advice of the university authorities and left Toho University.

Here’s the notice for both papers:

The university, a spokesperson told us

does not comment on the existence or status of investigations.

Meanwhile, four of the authors of the retracted papers had an earlier mega-correction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here’s that notice:

CELL BIOLOGY Correction for “Hepcidin-induced internalization of ferroportin requires binding and cooperative interaction with Jak2,” by Ivana De Domenico, Eric Lo, Diane M. Ward, and Jerry Kaplan, which appeared in issue 10, March 10, 2009, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (106:3800–3805; first published February 20, 2009; 10.1073/pnas.0900453106).

The authors note that several figures appeared incorrectly. In Fig. 1, the anti-Jak2 panel was replaced due to errors in preparing the figure for publication. In Fig. 2A, the human Jak2 differential interference contrast (DIC) image and the epifluorescence image (-Hepcidin) as well as the anti-Jak2 Western blot panel were replaced due to errors in preparing the figure for publication. Fig. 3B was replaced due to errors in preparing the figure for publication. Lastly, in Fig. 4A, the anti-Fpn panel (1.) was replaced due to errors in preparing the figure for publication. These errors do not affect the conclusions of the article. The corrected figures and their legends appear below.

We asked Kaplan why the papers were handled differently:

We take these matters very seriously and deeply regret that errors were made in the assembly of the figures. We stand by the data and conclusions in the papers.  We have independently repeated critical findings and preferred to correct the publications because these are important contributions to the literature.   Some of the original data for the Cell Metabolism papers were in the discarded notebooks.  That fact was influential in the decision to retract the Cell Metabolism papers.

Here’s the notice:

After publication of our article “Optimizing the exogenous antigen loading of monocyte-derived dendritic cells”, several discrepancies have been brought to our attention. In Figure 1 and Figure 2A, in contrast to what is stated in the figure legends, identical control staining is shown within the various parts of the figures. In Figure 3, the dot-plots with values shown as 10.2 and 10.8 were obtained using the same data file, as were those with 12.9 and 14.1. In Figure 7, the dot-plots with values of 9.8 and 16.2 turned out to be derived from the same data set. The appropriate experiments are being repeated, but in the meantime the authors would like to retract the original manuscript and apologize for these errors.

The paper has been cited 14 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, most recently by a PLoS ONE paper, “A Double-Blind Randomized Phase I Clinical Trial Targeting ALVAC-HIV Vaccine to Human Dendritic Cells.”

The paper’s use of the same controls in a number of images — which has tripped up a number of other authors about whom we’ve written — was noted last year here, here, and here by the Abnormal Science blog. The posts also raise questions about other papers by Schuler’s team.

Joerg Zwirner, the author of Abnormal Science, writes in that first post that he told senior author Gerold Schuler about the “severe irregularities” in the article last year. He also notes how prominent Schuler is:

In 2005, when the paper was published, the first and corresponding author Dr. Detlef Dieckmann left academics to become a dermatologist in private practice. Therefore, I contacted the senior author Prof. Schuler.

Since 1995, Gerold Schuler has been director of the Department of Dermatology at the university clinics Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
In 2006, he was awarded the German Cancer Prize for his work on dendritic cells.
He is speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre (Sonderforschungsbereich) 643: Strategies of cellular immune intervention.
At his clinic and elsewhere, melanoma patients have been treated using dendritic cell-based cancer vaccines, with very limited clinical efficacy so far (see here).
On July 7, after two terms, he retired by rotation from the Senate as well as the Executive Committee of the German Research Council (DFG), Germany’s largest research funding organisation.
From 2005-2011, he was also a member of the DFG Committee of Inquiry on Allegations of Scientific Misconduct.

What’s unclear, of course, is how the discrepancies ended up in the now-retracted paper, and why no one noticed before the study was published that some of the dot-plots “turned out to be derived from the same data set.”

We’ve contacted Schuler and the editor of International Immunity for comment, and will update with anything we hear back.

Update, 3 p.m. Eastern, 5/30/12: We received this message on behalf of Tadamitsu Kishimoto, the journal’s editor in chief:

The issues raised by the “Abnormal Science” blogs in relation to the original publication were apparently important in triggering the investigation by a University Committee for Good Scientific Practice at Erlangen-Nuremberg University, which also had input from an external expert.

No other Retractions are planned at the moment.

Update, 2 p.m. Eastern, 5/31/12: Schuler responded:

The errors were reported to me via by an e-mail of Dr. Jörg Zwirner to which I immediately responded, indicating that I will inform the University and ask for an independent investigation by the respective committee.

Unfortunately, Dr. Zwirner at the same time started what I consider a smear campaign targeted at me personally e.g. by writing e-mails to employees of a large number of Universities without waiting for the results of an independent investigation by the FAU (Head: Prof. Dr. Karl-Dieter Grüske).

There are no other retractions planned.