The above-cited article has been retracted by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the publisher of Diabetes. This article was previously the subject of an expression of concern in the February 2018 issue of the journal (Diabetes 2018;67:345. DOI: 10.2337/db17-ec2017a. PMID: 29109243).
On November 6, 2017, ADA contacted the corresponding author’s institution, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Naples, Italy), to request an investigation into the possible duplication of several images presented in this article. These instances include the following:
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The IRS1 blot in Fig. 4B and the IRS1 blot in Fig. 7C appear to be identical images that contain the following duplicated lanes:
∘ Lane 2 appears to be a duplicate of lanes 3, 5, and 6, with horizontal rotation.
∘ Lane 4 appears to be a duplicate of lane 7.
∘ Lane 11 appears to be a duplicate of lane 12.
In March 2018, the University informed ADA that a three-person committee had been appointed to investigate the issues cited above, but since then the University has not responded to requests for information on the status of the investigation. Therefore, ADA’s Panel on Ethical Scientific Programs (ESP) has independently reviewed these issues. The ESP determined that the concerns cited above are valid and that these and other possible instances of image duplication compromise the overall reliability of the study. ADA has chosen to retract this publication on the basis of the ESP’s assessment.
Diabetes is a member journal of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (publicationethics.org). As such, the editors of the journal and the ESP refer to COPE’s guidelines and recommendations when reviewing such matters.