An analysis of two prominent journals reveals dozens of papers with apparent mistakes in their nucleotide-targeting reagents.
Byrne and her colleagues manually screened reagents claiming to target unmodified human genes or genomic sequences in 334The team found errors in 253 of the 6,647 nucleotide sequences analysed. The mistakes were spread across 92 of the 334 manuscripts, and the median number of problematic sequences was 2 per paper. The proportion of papers with nucleotide-sequence errors ranged from 10% of papers in 2016 to 38% in 2020.
“We all know this happens, but I was surprised by the extent of the problem,” says Jo Vandesompele, a cancer researcher at Ghent University in Belgium. He adds that there are known issues in circular-RNA research, such as incomplete and inconsistent databases of circular-RNA sequences, that might make it easier for these types of issue to slip through.papers had been cited 8,048 times and the 21Byrne acknowledges that some of the errors flagged in the analysis could be unintentional.
Bernd Pulverer, head of scientific publications at the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany, says that, regardless of the errors’ origins, their presence in the published literature is a problem. “Mistakes are damaging, because people cannot rely on these papers to base future research on,” he says.
Byrne and her team say that the nature of many of the errors makes them seem suspicious. They found that some of the reagents that purported to target human genes or genomic sequences had no identifiable targets in the human genome, and that some targeted sequences in other species, such as rodents, plants and fungi.“It’s definitely very concerning that they don‘t have a perfect match to the intended target,” Vandesompele says.
“The editors-in-chief of both journals, and Springer Nature, agree with Professor Byrne that ensuring the integrity of the publication record is of the utmost importance, and we take concerns raised regarding the papers published in our journals very seriously,” says Chris Graf, research-integrity director at Springer Nature. “We requested details of these concerns, so that we could investigate them and act where appropriate, over a year ago, but they have only just been made available.
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