Retraction notice to “Melatonin alleviates acute spinal cord injury in rats through promoting on progenitor cells proliferation” [Saudi Pharm. J. 25 (2017) 570–574]

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors.

The corresponding author reported that after repeating the same experiment for a new study, they were unable to reproduce the same results. More specifically, they repeated the comparison of the expression of Nestin and NeuN between melatonin group and control group. It was found that there was no statistical difference in the immunohistochemistry IOD results of Nestin and NeuN between two groups, which was inconsistent with the positive results in the herein withdrawn article. To test this finding, they repeated the experiment, and the results were still negative. The conditions of these two experiments are similar to the original experiment, but the conclusion is opposite, that is to say, the conclusion of the original article may be false positive. Therefore, the reproducibility of the research process of the original study cannot be guaranteed, indicating that the reliability of the original conclusion needs to be further verified.