A strange scandal over what has been labelled a “baffling failure of peer review” shows no sign of abating, even though the paper that sparked the row has been withdrawn.
Bubbling under in the bloggosphere for a few weeks now, the episode has begun to attract the attention of the traditional press.
Our starting point is a paper in the peer-review journal Protemoics with the slightly odd title, ‘Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence’. All that’s left on the journal page is the retraction notice but you can read an abstract here.
Staunch atheist PZ Myers found the title alone enough to “make you wonder what the authors, Warda and Han, were smoking”. That was presumably before he noticed the line in the paper that declared, “More logically, the points that show proteomics overlapping between different forms of life are more likely to be interpreted as a reflection of a single common fingerprint initiated by a mighty creator than relying on a single cell that is, in a doubtful way, surprisingly originating all other kinds of life.”
The ‘mighty creation’ bit had people quickly crying ‘Creationists!’ The fact that an apparently creationist paper had slipped though peer review was not going to pass without mention. Other bloggers also got on the case (Shifting Through Science; Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience; Hyphoid Logic; for example).
Another bombshell – the paper has chunks of content very similar to previously published work. Many suspected plagiarism, as set out in this pdf.
One of the authors surfaced, but failed to really deal with the questions.
The Guardian managed to extract a press release from the publishers after some shenanigans (it’s strangely absent from the publisher’s website). “We are fully aware of the considerable interest that the article by Warda and Han has engendered, as well as the controversial viewpoints expressed by the authors,” says Proteomics’ editor-in-chief, Michael Dunn. “Clearly human error has caused a misstep in the normally rigorous peer review process that is standard practice for Proteomics and should prevent such issues arising.”
However the paper was only retracted for “a substantial overlap of the content of this article with previously published articles in other journals.”, not for the strange “mighty creator” line. Peer review isn’t perfect but you’d hope it would catch something like this.