WIKIMEDIA, COENAs part of a comprehensive—and uncommon—plan to maintain a squeaky-clean literature, Molecular and Cellular Biology has picked through its archives from the past several years to find troublesome figures, duplications in particular. Last month, the journal began to publish the first retractions and corrections to shake out of this quality-assurance effort.
“These corrections will probably be going on for several more issues to come,” says Roger Davis, the journal’s editor-in-chief and a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In May, the journal published one retraction and in June another retraction and eight corrections. None of the corrected or retracted articles were flagged by the post-publication peer review website PubPeer prior to the notices being published in the journal.
Like The EMBO Journal and the Journal of Cell Biology, which have led the way in dedicating staff to scrutinizing figures, Molecular and Cellular Biology prospectively analyzes submissions for inappropriate image manipulation, and has done so for years. Last year, it stepped up its efforts to hunt for duplications within papers before they get published, and ...
