A journal was contacted by a non-anonymous whistleblower pointing out problems with two figures in a published paper. The journal wrote to the authors, who provided them with films for the gels and an explanation and additional figure data for the histology image, where a mistake was made when assembling the images. The journal published an erratum and informed the whistleblower.
Subsequently, the whistleblower contacted the journal to ask that they retract the article because there were more problems with the work of these authors in other journals. The journal replied that they base our decisions on the material provided to them and according to the journal’s standards.
The journal was contacted again independently by two different readers pointing them to a blog alleging manipulation of the histology image in the erratum. It appeared to the journal that the images in question came from two consecutive tissue sections, which the authors confirmed. Subsequently, they stated they “messed up the images” and wanted to publish an erratum to the erratum. The journal declined as they thought if these were consecutive sections from the same tissue block that were treated differently, there was no problem and reported this to authors and erratum whistleblowers. The erratum whistleblowers disagreed and pointed out that the data were supposedly from different animals treated differently so that they could not come from the same tissue block. This was true and the journal had overlooked this during the investigation.
The journal wrote to the authors asking them to retract as the journal would not publish an erratum to an erratum.
The authors still maintained that they only made a mistake and provided a picture of the embedding wax tissues and slides. They offered to send the raw data saying that as medical students they were under great pressure and a retraction would terminate the budding medical career of the PhD student.
Question for COPE Council
- How would you advise we handle this case?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
The fact the authors have readily admitted their errors suggests blunders rather than deliberate manipulation, so what occurred was more likely through mistake rather than malpractice. Nonetheless, if the role of the editor is to quality control the literature and the role of retraction is to remove fatally flawed work from the literature, can the editor now be sure that there are no further problems?
So, the real issue is whether or not the rest of the paper is flawed, and that needs to be determined before any decision can be made. Do the major conclusions of the article still stand? A review by experts in the field, such as trusted editors/board members, could be extremely beneficial. If there is insufficient information to determine if the rest of the article is still valid, the journal could reach out to the university to request an investigation of the data/practices that led to these error(s). However, if the reviews are still favourable, the editors can then decide if they should issue an erratum of an erratum, or they could retract the paper and republish it, along with a comment explaining why.
Students frequently make errors, especially when they are not getting good supervision so, unless there is clear evidence of intentional misconduct, we would suggest erring on the side of leniency toward the students, especially as the journal review process for the erratum was not thorough.
There appeared to be some editorial mishap during the publication process. We would advise the editors to review their internal processes.