A couple of papers about some N-containing annulenes have been retracted and/or corrected after it was pointed out to the authors that the reaction they claimed made these exotic rings was actually 103 years old, and that they were much more likely to have made a pyridinium salt. There is a news story about it here
Does anyone know of this kind of any famous examples of a literature-search oversight leading to an erroneous claim like this?
I find the wording of Menger’s retraction a little odd:
“There exists an intriguing ambiguity in this case because 1 (the annulene) and 2 (the pyridine) have
indistinguishable NMR spectra and elemental analyses…"
OK, you can say that the elemental analysis would be the same, because the percentage of each elemental in each compound is the same, but how can you say that the NMR spectra are indistinguishable, when they presumably haven’t measured the NMR spectrum of the annulene since they haven’t made it!