Last January, a team of Chinese researchers led by Cai-Hua Xiong from Huazhong University of Science and Technology published their research on human hands in PLOS One. Their work seemed to give credit to God for producing the mechanisms of the hand, referencing a "Creator" throughout.
Following an intense debate on the authors' alleged creationist stance and the quality of editing and peer review at the journal, PLOS One decided to pull the plug on the study.
"Our internal review and the advice we have received have confirmed the concerns about the article and revealed that the peer review process did not adequately evaluate several aspects of the work," the journal says in the retraction, which did not come with added explanation or future plans related to the matter.
The brief note of retraction did not totally appease everyone.
Some readers were quick to cite its open-access nature, as PLOS One — unlike other journals like Science or Nature — is free-access to all and therefore suffers certain image or relevance issues.
Dr. Jonathan Eisen, chair of the advisory board of PLOS Biology, defended that open-access journals also come with a review.
"I don't think this will mean anything for open access journals, and it shouldn't, because it happens at top journals, too," he tells Wired.
In the journal's own published story in 2012 on the rate of retracted scientific papers, the authors analyzed more than 4,400 publications retracted from 1928 to 2011. At the turn of the century there was a more than 19 percent rise in retractions, during which retracted works from Chinese authors outnumbered those from Americans, Europeans and the Japanese.
But it isn't such a bleak situation after all, as the study suggested that this isn't too much when one considers the 1.8 million papers are published every year in about 28,000 scientific journals.
Some experts like biologist Andrew David Thaler maintained, however, that PLOS One should not have retracted the piece.
To be able to pass peer review is not being perfect but instead reporting something scientifically sound, he said, and that "typos and mistranslations" do not undermine the soundness of the work.
"[The authors'] references to a Creator were simply the result of translating a Chinese idiom into English, and that, in a more literal sense, the idiom meant 'nature as guided by natural processes like selection,' " he argues.
Photo: Jo Naylor | Flickr
