EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: EW-7197 Prevents Ulcerative Colitis-Associated Fibrosis and Inflammation

EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: M. M. Binabaj, F. Asgharzadeh, A. Avan, F. Rahmani, A. Soleimani, M. R. Parizadeh, et al., “EW-7197 Prevents Ulcerative Colitis-Associated Fibrosis and Inflammation,” Journal of Cellular Physiology 234, no. 7 (2018): 11654-11661, https://doi.org/10.1002/jcp.27823.

This Expression of Concern is for the above article, published online on 27 November 2018 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), and has been published by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief, Robert Heath; and Wiley Periodicals LLC. The Expression of Concern has been agreed due to concerns raised by the third party, which revealed inappropriate figure overlap in Figure 2(a), by the similar group of authors in different articles. While the corresponding author provided original data during the investigation, the reproduced control and colitis data (Figure 2a) are indeed considered unreliable as they were published elsewhere in a different scientific context. However, the authors have explained they conducted these experiments of the murine model of colitis using mice with the uniform characteristics including their age, species, and gender. More importantly, these experiments were conducted simultaneously by the same researchers in the same location, with the same molecular weight DSS, contributing to the consistency in the patterns observed. Furthermore, the Chair, Research Integrity Committee of the institution (Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran) has contacted the journal and confirmed that this article was a thesis independently conducted with different research aims, methodologies, and datasets in their university. Nevertheless, the Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher's Research Integrity team have decided to publish this Expression of Concern to inform readers that concerns about the reliability of the presented results remain.