Further retraction prompted by UQ investigation

The editors and publishers of the journal Brain Injury have retracted an academic paper following advice from The University of Queensland.

UQ Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research Professor Mark Blows said the 2013 paper involved two former UQ staff members who had already had other papers retracted following a UQ investigation.

Details of the earlier retractions, involving the European Journal of Neurology, the journal Aphasiology, and the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and a previous paper in Brain Injury, can be found here, here, here and here.

The University advised several journals, including Brain Injury, of concerns about articles after a formal research misconduct inquiry in 2013.

UQ has examined 92 papers published since 2007 by the former staff members.

Brain Injury has now published the following retraction notice:

We, the Editors and Publisher of Brain Injury are retracting the following article:

Caroline H.S. Barwood & Bruce E. Murdoch. “Unravelling the influence of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) on cognitive-linguistic processing: A comparative group analysis”, Brain Injury 27.6 (2013): 671-676 http://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/02699052.2013.775500 

The Editors and Taylor & Francis received notification from the University of Queensland, that they have not been able to satisfactorily identify and match all patient data to that within the publication and thus cannot verify the entire data set. Further, assessment of the human research ethics approvals have found that ethical approval had expired prior to the testing of at least nine of the study participants and Dr. Barwood was not named as an investigator on any of the approvals which did apply to this research. There is no evidence or reason to suggest that participants were subjected to research protocols which had not previously been approved.

This action constitutes a breach of warranties made by the first author with respect to originality. Taylor & Francis notes that we received, peer-reviewed, accepted, and published the article in good faith based on these warranties, and censure this action.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as RETRACTED.

Media: communications@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 1120.