By trevorst on May 29, 2012
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.
Read more here at Retraction Watch.
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By trevorst on May 21, 2012
In a case that is a good reminder of why journal editors shouldn’t ignore anonymous tips, a Seoul National University stem cell researcher has been forced to retract four papers, and withdraw another under peer review, in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling following a whistleblower’s exhaustive analysis.
Two retractions by Soo Kyung Kang, a professor of veterinary biotechnology at Seoul National University, appeared on May 9 after an anonymous whistleblower sent a 70-slide PowerPoint presentation to the editors of ten journals that contained evidence of suspicious floating error bars, errors larger than actual measurements, pasted-together lanes in PCR gels and RNA and CHIP blots and several cases where the same control blot data is shown across different experiments and in different papers. In all, the whistleblower raises questions about 14 papers in the ten journals.
Read the rest of the post here at Retraction Watch.
Posted in Clips |
By trevorst on September 9, 2011
Published: Nature Medicine 17, 1028 (2011)
In August, after a tense run-up to the default deadline, US lawmakers passed the Budget Control Act. The legislation that increased the debt ceiling contains $917 billion in cuts through 2021, which will probably affect core research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the science office of the Department of Defense. But individuals involved in global health programs are also bracing for a hit come September, when Congress scrutinizes how to appropriate next year’s federal budget, given the nation’s tightened purse strings.
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n9/full/nm0911-1028a.html
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