2013最难忘的撤稿十件事

诸平

    据《科学家》（The Scientist）杂志网站2013年12月30日报道，援引“撤稿观察”（Retraction Watch）的信息，自2010年创办该博客以来，科学文献的撤稿情况接二连三，可以说是络绎不绝。据汤姆森科技知网（Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge）报道，有511篇论文撤稿。作者（ Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky）根据读者的反应和其他“科学”的因素列出了2013年撤稿最令人难忘的前10名，排名不分先后，具体内容摘引如下供大家参考。

FLICKR, JUDY VAN DER VELDEN

1. One of our favorite stories this yearwas about a 15-year-old retraction by David Vaux, of the Walter and Eliza HallInstitute of Medical Research. Vaux, who has fought the good fight forscientific integrity many times, had a heck of a time publishing a rebuttal toa flawed piece of research in Nature. So he decided to retract his own essay about that study.

2. Another retraction story took a page outof a spy novel: Investigators looking into research by a star researcher wereforced to install hidden cameras that revealed he was tampering with the evidence. He has now retracted three papers from the literature.

3. Graduate students take note: Faking datain your dissertation can still get you a PhD, as long as the thesis remains “scientifically valid.” That would seem to be the take-homemessage of the tale of Nitin Aggarwal, whom the Office of Research Integrity(ORI) found guilty of misconduct. The case has led to one retraction so far.

4. Speaking of ORI investigations, werecommend reading about the case of Michael W. Miller, who faked data on his federal grantapplications and had several papers retracted in 2012. This year, however,Miller bounced back, landing a job as, you guessed it, a consultant for grant applications! (He lost that gig afterwe called his employers to ask if they knew about his past.)

5. For sheer controversy value, one of thebiggest retractions of 2013 has to be that of a 2012 paper on genetically modified maize and rats by Gilles Séraliniand colleagues. In the retraction—which Séralini strongly opposed—the editor of Foodand Chemical Toxicology didn’t cite any of the usual reasons forretraction, such as fraud or gross error, instead basically saying that thepaper shouldn’t have passed peer review to begin with.

6. The flip side of author objections mightbe, “What does it take to get your own paper retracted?” That question occurredto anyone who had followed the story of Robert Trivers, who finally succeededin having a 2005 Nature paper he’d co-authored—and soon doubted—retracted in November.

7. We have to hand it this year toscientists who’ve done the right thing, which in our case means retractingpapers even if it comes at great professional cost. Biologists PamelaRonaldand Daniel St. Johnston, who voluntarily retracted papers from Science and Nature,respectively, are on that list. And scientists reward that kind of behaviortoo, it appears.

8. In January, we wrote about a successfuleffort by “Clare Francis,” the pseudonymous  scourge of journalsworldwide, to force a retraction of a 2006 paper in the Journal of CellBiology—providing proof positive of our contention that anonymouswhistleblowers deserve a fair hearing by editors. Love him or hate him—and yes,Clare is a “he”— Francis is right more often than a broken clock, to mangle afavorite phrase of Ivan’s father.

9. We have several candidates in a category we call “Plagiarism Euphemism of the Year.” There’s “unattributedoverlap,” “a significant originality issue,” and an “approach.” Why, we wonder,do journals have such a hard time naming It That Cannot Be Named?

10. For some comic . . . well, not quiterelief, given the subject, but the retraction of “Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings” deserves a mention.

   Finally, although it was not a retraction,an honorable mention goes to Serbian academics who managed to get an Alan Sokal-esque paper citing Borat and porn star Ron Jeremy publishedin a Romanian magazine.

   Happy 2014! Here’s hoping you don’t have toretract too many of your New Year’s resolutions.

   Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus areco-founders of RetractionWatch.