“Although the authors remain confident about their findings, Science has concluded on the basis of peer-review that a paper built on the corrected data would not meet the journal’s standards for genome-wide association studies,’’ the statement said. “The researchers worked exhaustively to correct the errors in the original paper, and we regret the outcome of the extensive revision and re-review process was not more favorable.’’
The BU scientists who led the retracted work, Dr. Thomas Perls and Paola Sebastiani, referred questions to a spokeswoman, who sent a statement indicating that they planned to publish the corrected data in a different journal.
“We discovered that technical errors and an inadequate quality-control protocol had introduced errors in our results,’’ Perls and Sebastiani said in the statement. “We engaged an outside academic laboratory to independently assess the quality of the data and remove ambiguous data… . Because some details of the new analysis do change, however, we are voluntarily retracting the original manuscript and are pursuing alternative publication of the corrected results.’’
The retracted paper is the latest example of a striking finding unraveling as harsh, public critiques are leveled after a study is published in a major journal. Journals such as Science have a vetting process, called peer review, in which outside scientists are supposed to ensure that evidence presented by researchers support a paper’s findings and that it is worthy of publication.
“There was a pretty broad consensus among people who do these genome-wide association studies all the time that the [problems in the] original version of this paper should have been caught in peer review,’’ said Jeffrey Barrett, group leader of statistical genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a genomic research center in the United Kingdom.
