The hot paper of the moment is a publication in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology
that proclaims
Images in this article were generated by Midjourney
Here’s panel D from Fig 3 of Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway:
An expression of concern was posted by the journal shortly after the paper was made available, and we’ll see what the next steps are.
This particular paper isn’t used for any GO and as a review article, is unlikely to be used as there are many primary sources on the JAK-STAT pathway. However, not all controversial/unsound papers attract this much attention, and it can be difficult to know when papers have been found to be misleading. This brings up a question for GO annotations- what happens when papers are retracted and they have been used to support GO annotation(s)? GO has a numerous quality control checks for our products, and one of those is a hard filter for any annotations to retracted publications. Such annotations would be automatically excluded from our release products- so there’s no need for users to be worried.
As usual, if you do find any annotations of concern, don’t hesitate to let us know.