Research blunder sees five articles retracted by Yuen Kwok-yung

Government health expert Yuen Kwok-yung on Monday (Oct 31) retracted five research articles he published with other scholars between 2010 and 2014 for duplicate pictures in their articles. 

A challenge was first raised by Dutch microbiologist Elizabeth Bik on Twitter, where she pointed to duplications on the computer-scanned images from the papers. 

“Reported to @ASMicrobiology (The American Society for Microbiology) [and] @JVirology (The Journal of Virology) in 2017, but the editors did not answer, nor did they take action,” Bik tweeted on August 1. 

Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Yuen admitted he received an email earlier, in which he was informed that the similarity of the protein tracking exceeded their predicted levels in seven research articles. 

“On August 1. it was brought to my attention that certain Western Blot figure panels in papers published by myself and my collaborators between 2004 and 2014 were more similar than expected to other panels in the same figures,” Yuen said. 

“Unfortunately, the length of time elapsed since publication meant that original samples were no longer available for repeating the Western blot experiments.” 

“An investigation into the circumstances leading to generation of the incorrect images was also difficult as many collaborators had left our department in the interim and original uncropped images were not available,” he added. 

Yurn continued he had contacted the editors of the academic journals the same day and retracted the affected papers, saying he and his team always adhere to the highest standards of research integrity. 

“I must accept responsibility as corresponding author of most of the affected articles.” 

The articles were published between 2010 and 2014 and most of them were about studies on the coronavirus, including the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. One of the articles published in 2014 was about the coronavirus found in dolphins. 

Yuen is the Chair of Infectious Diseases of the Department of Microbiology, the University of Hong Kong. 

Apart from Yuen, authors of those articles included Woo Chiu-yat, the former chairman of HKU’s Department of Microbiology. 

Click here for Bik’s original tweet.