A team of researchers headed by Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a research paper from the influential journal Nature. The researchers said that they had failed to reproduce the findings and that they had found “inconsistencies” between the paper and the original data.

The researchers did the work while at Harvard Medical School, which is now conducting an investigation into possible misconduct, The New York Times reported today.

Ms. Buck is now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; the first author on the paper, Zhihua Zou, is now an assistant professor of neuroscience and cell biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. According to a note appended to the retraction, Mr. Zou “provided all figures and data for the paper.”

The Times reported that Mr. Zou had agreed to the retraction but had not admitted to wrongdoing and remained confident in the paper. Ms. Buck has asked the Hutchinson center to investigate two other articles for which Mr. Zou was the lead author.

The paper, which appeared in 2001, described a way to map the neurons in the brain that corresponded to smell receptors in the nose. Although the paper had been cited in other research articles many times, other researchers in the field told the Times and Nature that they did not expect its retraction to cause major waves. —Lila Guterman