McGill committee says Nature figures were ?intentionally contrived ...

Maya Saleh, via McGill

An associate professor at Montreal?s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification, Retraction Watch has learned.

Concerns had been raised about four papers by Maya Saleh and colleagues:

According to a report by the McGill committee, highlights of which were obtained by Retraction Watch, two figures in the Nature paper?had been ?intentionally contrived and falsified.? One of those figures was duplicated in a PNAS paper, which also contained an image that? had incorrectly labeled some proteins.

The committee said they could not determine who had falsified the figures, but said that there was no evidence it was Saleh, who was the only common author among the four papers.

The committee also said that figures in the Cell Host and Microbe paper contained ?touchup of blemishes,? which they said was ?not an acceptable procedure.? They said the original films could not be found, and noted that this was ?not in compliance with the McGill Regulation on the Conduct of Research.? Irregularities in the Immunity paper, they said, were ?due to artifacts created during the preparation of the scans for publication.?

The Immunity and Cell Host and Microbe papers could stand, said the committee, which recommended corrections for the Nature and PNAS papers. Saleh tells Retraction Watch that Donald Nicholson, the senior author on the papers and Merck?s vice-president and worldwide head of basic research in immunology and infectious diseases, would be handling the corrections. Saleh did a postdoc at Merck from 2001 to 2004, but her affiliation on the Nature paper is the La Jolla Institute, and on the PNAS paper is McGill.

Some of the published work was funded by grants to Saleh from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Saleh and colleagues have an unrelated Corrigendum in Nature.

We?ve contacted McGill provost Anthony Masi and research integrity officer Abe Fuks, and will update with anything we learn.

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Source: http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/mcgill-committee-says-nature-figures-were-intentionally-contrived-and-falsified/

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