A 2012 article on the role of miR-31 in pulmonary fibrosis appearing in the FASEB Journal has been retracted, reports Adam Marcus at Retraction Watch. According to the retraction notice, the paper contained "previously published data."
The senior author, Gang Liu from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, tells Marcus that the paper contained a control image that had appeared in a previous paper. "The experiments represented in Figure 9 in this retracted paper were designed to share the control groups with an earlier study from us because of similar nature of the two studies," Liu says. "Representative micrographs for each group were taken and saved in a common folder. When the manuscript was initially prepared, representative micrographs for the shared control groups that had been utilized [in an American Journal of Pathology, paper] were inadvertently selected again for this subsequent paper." He also tells Marcus that he plans to resubmit the paper with the correct image.