Madoff retracts scientific paper

No, not that Madoff.

We’re talking about Robert Madoff, editor of Diseases of the Colon & Rectum. His journal is pulling a 2012 paper by a group of authors in Spain who seem to have been unable to back up their findings when they were found to contain errors.

The article, “Perianal versus endoanal application of glyceryl trinitrate 0.4% ointment in the treatment of chronic anal fissure: results of a randomized controlled trial. Is this the solution to the headaches?” looked at what evidently is a significant side effect of nitroglycerin treatment for anal fissures: headaches. According to the abstract:

Lichtenthaler retraction count rises to 11

Ulrich Lichtenthaler’s retraction record is now in the double digits, with his 10th and 11th retractions coming in the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Here’s one notice, for a paper cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:

UCL finds errors in work by biologist Cossu, but no “deliberate intention to mislead”

Cossu

A cell biologist at University College London (UCL) who has had one paper retracted and another corrected has been cleared of misconduct by the university.

The news, first reported by Times Higher Education, comes after a retraction of a paper by Giulio Cossu prompted by pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis that we wrote about in January.

Here’s the full text of UCL’s statement on the investigation:

Failure to reproduce experiments, errors lead to retraction of pancreatic cancer paper

The authors of a paper in Laboratory Investigation have retracted it after they were unable to “reproduce key experiments,” and discovered “several minor errors.”

Here’s the retraction notice for “Slug enhances invasion ability of pancreatic cancer cells through upregulation of matrix metalloproteinase-9 and actin cytoskeleton remodeling,” by Liqun Wu and colleagues of The Affiliated Hospital of Medical College, QingDao University, in China’s Shan Dong Province:

A new record? 27-plus years later, a notice of redundant publication

A 1984 paper in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B is now subject to a notice of redundant publication because a lot of it had been published in Cell the same year.

Whether 28 years — 27 years and 9 months, to be precise — is any kind of official record is unclear, since we haven’t really kept track of notices of redundant publication. It would, however, beat the record for longest time between publication and retraction, 27 years and one month.

Here’s the notice, which ran in September of last year but just came to our attention:

Double-dipping leads to removal of petroleum research paper

Iranian scientists have lost one of two articles they submitted — and published — simultaneously to different journals. Watch as confusion ensues.

The retracted paper, “Permeability Estimation of a Reservoir Based on Neural Networks Coupled with Genetic Algorithms,” appeared online in August 2011  in Petroleum Science and Technology, a Taylor & Francis journal. According to the liner notes, the paper had been received on January 15, 2010 and accepted a few weeks later. It has been cited once since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, by its authors, in a paper published in the same journal.

Meanwhile, in August 2011 the authors (minus one name) also published “Evolving neural network using real coded genetic algorithm for permeability estimation of the reservoir,”  in Expert Systems With Applications, an Elsevier title.

The standing paper — which has been cited seven times — now carries the following erratum notice (dated far into the future, September 2013):

Paper by Bristol-Myers Squibb researchers retracted for “unsolved legal reasons”

A group of researchers at Bristol-Myers Squibb has had a paper retracted for reasons we can’t quite figure out.

All the notice for “Simultaneous expression of antibody light and heavy chains in Pichia pastoris: improving retransformation outcome by linearizing vector at a different site,” published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, says is: