Abstract
The Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cells and Development officially retracts the article entitled, “Detection, Characterization, and Spontaneous Differentiation In Vitro of Very Small Embryonic-Like Putative Stem Cells in Adult Mammalian Ovary,” by Seema Parte, Deepa Bhartiya, Jyoti Telang, Vinita Daithankar, Vinita Salvi, Kusum Zaveri, and Indira Hinduja (Stem Cells Dev 2011;20(8):1451-1464; doi: 10.1089/scd.2010.0461).
A reported comment on the PubPeer platform suggested that the “images in Figure 6D and Figure 6F appear to overlap but are described differently. The images are oriented differently, have different contrast, and are at a different magnification (red boxes are not the same size). Difficult to understand how these transformations would occur merely as errors during figure assembly,” (PubPeer, 2022).
The Editor-in-Chief of the journal contacted the corresponding author of the paper, Dr. Deepa Bhartiya, requesting a “prompt response and intended course of action” to the questions raised on PubPeer. Dr. Bhartiya responded, indicating that the errors in both figures were “an unintentional human error.”
After a series of communications between Dr. Bhartiya and the Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cells and Development, Dr. Bhartiya claimed full responsibility for the contents of the article and requested that corrections to the paper by removing the incorrect images, as indicated in the email below:
“A discrepancy in two figures (Fig 6D and negative control in Fig 11) was picked up by an Artificial Intelligence based tool and pointed out on Pubpeer. A careful examination shows that indeed there is a mistake but it was inadvertent and simply an oversight and not a deliberate manipulation of any kind. It is the same figure of a neuron turned up side down and pasted at two places. This remained unnoticed by the authors and also was not picked up by the reviewers or the readers [for] over a decade. It is our humble request to all those who have cited our work to be rest assured that the work integrity is intact. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to those directly and indirectly affected by this process. My students worked with great dedication to acquire the data and obtained results to compile into a manuscript. There is no manipulation whatsoever and this unintentional error remained unnoticed by everyone involved with the manuscript preparation and publication. We will try to submit the revised version again with due permissions. We request the editor to allow us to publish an addendum/erratum to take care of the mistake otherwise it is his decision to retract the paper.” [sic]
The Editor of the journal rejected the contention that the manipulation and combining of the same images within the panels purported to represent different experiments could be unintentional, and hence has denied the request to publish an erratum and offered the authors the opportunity to self-retract the article. The authors declined to do so and continued to request a corrigendum. The Editor determined that an editorial retraction was warranted based on the discovery of the discrepancies in the images. Dr. Bhartiya was notified via email of the decision to editorially retract the paper.