RETRACTED: Autophagy is a pro-survival mechanism in ovarian cancer against the apoptotic effects of euxanthone

Abstract

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and the corresponding author as panels from Figure 2A appear as similar to panels from Figure 3A of the article published by Xiangyang Dou, Meihua Wang, Tao Zhang and Jiapei Yao in The Anatomical Record (2019) https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24324 and Figure 2A of the article published by Qiang Wang, Yi Yan, Jie Zhang, Peng Guo, Yuqing Xing, Yong Wang, Fawei Qin and Qingyun Zeng in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy 104 (2018) 28-35 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopha.2018.05.013. Moreover, panels from Figure 2B appear as similar (after vertical mirroring) to panels from Figure 2A of the article published by Ning Wang, Fang Zhou, Jinhui Guo, Huaiyuan Zhu, Shanshui Luo and Jingjing Cao in Life Sciences 209 (2018) 498-506 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lfs.2018.08.052. Also, panels from Figure 7C appear as similar to panels from Figure 8D of the article published by Zichao Li, Luying Zhang, Mingquan Gao, Mei Han, Kaili Liu, Zhuang Zhang, Zhi Gong, Lifei Xing, Xianzhou Shi, Kui Lu and Hui Gao in the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research 38:8 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1186/s13046-018-1012-z. Although this article was published earlier than the other articles, the Editor decided to retract this article given the concerns on the reliability of the data. The corresponding author acknowledged that some of the TUNEL, Flow Cytometry and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) measurements have been provided by third party entities. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

Keywords: Apoptosis; Autophagy; Euxanthone; Ovarian cancer; STAT3.