Back in November 2013, we wrote about a correction in PNAS about a May 2012 paper by a group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York who, as we said at the time
had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher — what we might call plagiarism, in a less charitable mood.
Continue reading Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.
Over the past few months, there has been a great deal of criticism of the work of stem cell researcher Jacob Hanna, especially on PubPeer.
Now, Hanna has responded in the comments of the PubPeer entries for a number of papers. He has also posted a number of PDFs, including his PhD thesis, and correspondence with scientists who have been critical of his work.
He also wrote a response to a criticism published on bioRxIV, a non-peer reviewed repository of biology pre-prints.
One of Hanna’s comments on PubPeer is a summary of the issues with his Blood paper on PubPeer, blaming the figure errors on “medical trainees” who did the word while he was away at Mount Sinai. Here’s his explanation: Continue reading Stem cell researcher Jacob Hanna responds to criticism
A retracted 2008 paper originally flagged by Clare Francis has been republished in Environmental Health Perspectives with updated figures and new data.
According to the editor’s note appended to the newly published paper, there was no evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the authors. The new paper went through peer review as an entirely new submission, and comes to the same conclusion as the original: Continue reading Retracted paper on herbicide-ovarian cancer connection republished
A team led by David Latchman, a geneticist and administrator at University College London, has notched a mysterious retraction in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and has had 25 more papers questioned on PubPeer.
The JBC notice for “Antiapoptotic activity of the free caspase recruitment domain of procaspase-9: A novel endogenous rescue pathway in cell death” is as useless as they come, a regular occurrence for the journal: Continue reading Prominent geneticist nets retraction, two corrections, and a lot of questions
Hindawi journal PPAR Research has pulled a cancer immunology paper after discovering it contained almost no new information.
Instead, it was a Frankenstein-style stitch job, containing sentences ripped from 33 different papers. 18 of those ended up in the citations; for 15 more, the authors didn’t even do them that courtesy. You can see a meticulously color-coded call out here.
Here’s the notice for “A Role for PPARy in the Regulation of Cytokines in Immune Cells and Cancer”: Continue reading Franken-paper from U.S. federal contractor heads to the grave
A postdoc at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation faked data in a submitted paper and in a grant application, according to a new report from the Office of Research Integrity.
Bin Kang admitted to the misconduct, in which he Continue reading Oklahoma postdoc admits to faking data in grant application, submitted paper
A pair of cell biologists have taken responsibility for extensive figure errors that scuttled their paper in the Journal of Cell Biology.
While there were five authors, first and last authors Eva Szabo and Michal Opas took responsibility in the notice. A number of figures “contain incorrect data and/or presentation errors,” and the original data isn’t available for verification. The notice is unusually clear about which figures and data are compromised.
The paper was published in 2008, and retracted on January 12, 2015. It has been cited 32 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice for “Calreticulin inhibits commitment to adipocyte differentiation’: Continue reading Fat cell paper earns unusually detailed retraction
An international group of engineers lost a paper in November after the journal realized the majority of the data came from a government assessment of Australia’s energy resources without a citation.
The paper, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, focused on geothermal energy, while the government report was far broader in scope. However, the lack of independent research was enough to sink the review. We covered another Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews retraction recently, making us wonder if this is part of a crack-down for the journal.
Here’s the notice for “A review of geothermal energy resources in Australia: Current status and prospects”: Continue reading Geothermal paper undermined by borrowing data without citing
The Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy has retracted a 2014 paper by a group of South Korean researchers after determining that the authors had doubled up on their publishing odds by submitting the manuscript to a competing journal.
The article was titled “A comparative study of low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with or without chemical peeling using Jessner’s solution in melasma patients,” and it purported to find that:
This study suggests Jessner’s peel is a safe and effective method in the early course of treatment for melasma when combined with low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser.
Continue reading Duplicate submission forces retraction of derm laser paper
A graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver faked data in his work at a drug research lab that has notched two retractions and an expression of concern over “data integrity,” according to an extensive university investigation.
It seems like many more retractions are on the horizon for grad student Rajendra Kadam, who worked in the lab of Uday Kompella, a pharmaceutical researcher at the university.
Here’s an excerpt from the report, which you can read in full (but redacted) here: Continue reading U Colorado “golden boy” grad student faked data in drug lab, says investigation