Month: March 2013

Is defining plagiarism “like catching smoke in a butterfly net?” Towson professor under investigation

neil
Benjamin A. Neil

Earlier this month, we brought you the story of a paper in a journal about business ethics being retracted for — wait for it — plagiarism. The paper that seemed to be the one in question — see the post for why that was a bit unclear — was by Benjamin A. Neil, a professor at Towson University in Maryland.

Today, the Baltimore Sun reports that Neil is under investigation by Towson for more alleged plagiarism, and has “resigned his post as the head of the city school system’s ethics panel.” From the Sun: Continue reading Is defining plagiarism “like catching smoke in a butterfly net?” Towson professor under investigation

Why publishers should explain why papers disappear: The complicated Lewandowsky study saga

frontiersLast year, Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues posted a paper, scheduled for an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, with a, shall we say, provocative title:

NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax

An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science

In an interview last year with Lewandowsky, NPR gathered some of the reactions to the paper — which was formally published two days ago — from those it profiled: Continue reading Why publishers should explain why papers disappear: The complicated Lewandowsky study saga

Orangutan-Ebola link in PLOS ONE paper under scrutiny

plosonePLOS ONE has issued a fascinating expression of concern about data collection in a paper it published late last year on the possible spread of deadly viruses among Indonesian orangutans. The case has been brought to the attention of the Indonesian government, but more on that in a moment.

The article, published last July by an international group of primate scientists led by Chairul Nidom, a virologist at Indonesia’s Airlangga University, sounded an alarm about “wild” orangutans in Borneo: Blood tests of 353 “healthy” animals showed antibodies for viruses akin to Ebola. What’s more, the filoviruses viruses to which the antibodies responded, as New Scientist and other outlets reported when the original paper came out, included strains not previously seen outside Africa (as well as Marburg, another deadly infection).

The article immediately prompted two comments. The first, by a poster called orangutanborneo, raised questions about the scale and logistics of the project: Continue reading Orangutan-Ebola link in PLOS ONE paper under scrutiny

Rapid response: Authors retract a PNAS paper within six weeks after Nobel Prize winner spots an error

pnas 2-26Sometimes, retractions happen months, or even years, after another researcher spots problems in a paper. But when it’s a Nobel Prize winner who finds the error, things might move more quickly.

In the case of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the retraction happened within six weeks. Here’s the notice for “Voltage sensor ring in a native structure of a membrane-embedded potassium channel,” by Liang Shi, Hongjin Zheng, Hui Zheng, Brian A. Borkowski, Dan Shi, Tamir Gonen, and Qiu-Xing Jiang, which first appeared online on February 11: Continue reading Rapid response: Authors retract a PNAS paper within six weeks after Nobel Prize winner spots an error

Image problems lead to demise of paper on ginseng for heart attack

JMM march13coverA group of researchers from Shangdong, China, has retracted their 2011 paper in the Journal of Molecular Medicine on the heart-protective properties of a substance in ginseng because the article contained dodgy figures.

The article, “Ginsenoside-Rg1 enhances angiogenesis and ameliorates ventricular remodeling in a rat model of myocardial infarction,” purported to show that ginsenoside: Continue reading Image problems lead to demise of paper on ginseng for heart attack

Who deserves to be an author on a scientific paper?

labtimes 2-2013Although authorship issues are not the most common reason we see for retractions, they’re one of the most vexing. We’ve seen multiple cases in which papers are retracted because colleagues say authors didn’t have a right to publish data, for example. In other cases, authors who didn’t know about a paper are surprised when it comes out.

So for our most recent column in LabTimes, we decided to look at these situations and try to answer some questions: Continue reading Who deserves to be an author on a scientific paper?

Hefty correction in JBC for GMO researchers in image tampering case

jbcmarch13coverLast November we wrote about the case of Alejandra Bravo and Mario Soberón, a wife-husband team of microbiologists studying genetically modified crops, who had been disciplined by the National Autonomous University of Mexico for having manipulated images in 11 papers.

The tinkering did not rise to the level of fraud, according to the university — which perhaps helps explain why it didn’t lead to requests for retractions, according to Soberón.  Instead, he said at the time, at least seven journals would be issuing corrections. We now have what appears to be the first of these, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Continue reading Hefty correction in JBC for GMO researchers in image tampering case

One in twelve Belgian medical scientists admits having “made up and/or massaged data”: Survey

001_coverEOSA recently released survey of Belgian scientists suggests that Flemish medical researchers admit to having made up or massaged data more often than their counterparts around their world.

The survey, by the Dutch science magazine Eos with the help of Joeri Tijdink, of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, and the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism, found that Continue reading One in twelve Belgian medical scientists admits having “made up and/or massaged data”: Survey

Geneticists take HeLa sequence off-line after Lacks family notes they hadn’t given consent

g3HeLa — the cell line that has apparently taken over any number of others commonly used in science, suggesting that many researchers may not have been studying what they thought they were studying — is back in the news. This weekend, it was the DNA sequence of the cells that’s made headlines, with a quiet unpublishing of data.

As Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — Lacks’s name is where “HeLa” comes from, as they’re her cells — wrote in the New York Times Sunday, a group of researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory published an analysis of the HeLa cells’ genome on March 11 in G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics, a new journal from the Genetics Society of America.

That genome, of course, could be very useful in research, given how widely used HeLa cells are. But the problem was Continue reading Geneticists take HeLa sequence off-line after Lacks family notes they hadn’t given consent

Seals of disapproval, as pinniped paper gets yanked for plagiarism

ImageJoseph Hoffman, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Bielefeld in Germany says he got a “kind of odd” feeling as he read a recent paper on the transcriptome of the spotted seal. Let’s just call it deja vu.

The article, “Characterization of the spotted seal Phoca largha transcriptome using Illumina paired-end sequencing and development of SSR markers,” which appeared in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part D: Genomics and Proteomics:

Continue reading Seals of disapproval, as pinniped paper gets yanked for plagiarism