Bob Grant, over on The Scientist's blog, describes a recent kerfuffle over a Cell paper and what it says about peer-review. The 40 comments on the post are already there with some interesting additional perspectives:
Improper citation, disregard for antecedent research, and shoddy experimentation - those are just a few of the allegations levied against a recent research paper written by a team of Stanford University scientists.
One of the paper's chief critics, University of Cambridge biologist Peter Lawrence, says that the problems with the publication exemplify a broader problem in scientific publishing.
"There's a pressure on scientists to publish in these top journals," Lawrence told The Scientist, "to promote their work as more novel than it really is."
The paper in question, published in a June issue of Cell, described a model for understanding the genetic and cellular machinery underlying planar cell polarity (PCP), the cell-to-cell communication that epithelial cells use to align and arrange themselves to function as an organized tissue....
Janet discusses the ethics of the whole episode:
Do scientists see themselves, like Isaac Newton, building new knowledge by standing on the shoulders of giants? Or are they most interested in securing their own position in the scientific conversation by stepping on the feet, backs, and heads of other scientists in their community? Indeed, are some of them willfully ignorant about the extent to which their knowledge is build on someone else's foundations?
Thought-provoking stuff....
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In any area of study, you are always going to have people who have different intentions.
I can't recall a paper being retracted for failing to cite relevant earlier studies, but a formal erratum could be in order. This is a good example of the formalization of a "second round" of peer review on the part of the readers, like the comments section at the PLoS journals, and now the online letters at PNAS. Humans are fallible, it's true, but some time on PubMed and ISI Web of Knowledge should prevent the really glaring errors in scholarship.
This stuff happens all the time. That Nature paper from the group in Ohio State about PbTe doped with thallium being so incredibly awesome? That was published years ago in a smaller, lesser known journal.
The Nature paper on gold nanoparticle crystals. Published previously using very similar reagents in Science from a group at the same university. It happens all the time. It's nothing new I'm afraid.