It’s Diederik Stapel’s golden retraction: Number 50.
The lucky notice appears in Social Psychology: Continue reading Diederik Stapel retraction count hits 50
Month: March 2013
Post 982 — in which we find plagiarized bone graft paper that grafted from other papers
The Surgeon has retracted a 2012 article by a group from the U.K. who took text from a previously published article. So, you say? Nu?
Well, we found — through relatively little effort — that the plagiarizees were themselves, shall we say, liberal in their use of material from other sources.
The retracted article was titled “Bone graft substitutes: What are the options?,” and it appeared in August 2012. One of the options, we guess, was to steal text.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Post 982 — in which we find plagiarized bone graft paper that grafted from other papers
Error scuppers paper on treatment for liver fibrosis
Pharmaceutical Biology has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of liver researchers from China after the discovery of an error that evidently invalidated the results in the paper.
The article, “Antifibrotic effects of protocatechuic aldehyde on experimental liver fibrosis,” purported to show that
protocatechuic aldehyde, the major degradation of phenolic acids …Â has potentially conferring antifibrogenic effects.
In other words, the compound appears to prevent the formation of liver fibroids.
But it doesn’t — at least, not according to the study — as the retraction notice explains: Continue reading Error scuppers paper on treatment for liver fibrosis
Brian Deer’s modest proposal for post-publication peer review
Brian Deer’s name will no doubt be familiar to many Retraction Watch readers. Deer, of course, is the award-winning investigative reporter known for his reporting on numerous medical issues, including Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted research into autism and vaccines.
Deer is giving a talk next week at the UK’s “Evidence Live” conference,and has a proposal that he hopes will make it more difficult for dishonest researchers to hide their misdeeds — and make it easier for journals to retract fraudulent papers. He has expressed concern before that voluntary codes have no teeth. Deer is proposing an amendment to the ICMJE’s Uniform Requirements for the Submission of Manuscripts to Biomedical Journals:
Continue reading Brian Deer’s modest proposal for post-publication peer review
Flu paper duplication earns Expression of Concern
A six year-old review on bird flu that failed to credit some content from another six year-old review of bird flu is now stamped with an Expression of Concern.
Here’s the notice, from Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses: Continue reading Flu paper duplication earns Expression of Concern
Charge of “scientific yellow journalism” has supervisor seeing red, leads to retraction
Last October, Anica Klockars, a neuroscience researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a colleague published a controversial comment in the journal Small GTPases, a Landes Bioscience title.
The title of the letter was meant to provoke: “Scientific yellow journalism.”
As the authors wrote: Continue reading Charge of “scientific yellow journalism” has supervisor seeing red, leads to retraction
Cardiologist accused of misconduct strikes back in a journal
Retraction Watch readers may recall the case of Don Poldermans, a prominent Dutch cardiology researcher who left a research position in late 2011 amid an investigation into his work. In a letter in the American Journal of Medicine titled “Scientific Fraud or a Rush to Judgement?” Poldermans — three of whose papers are subject to Expressions of Concern — tries to set the record straight, something he has tried to do before.
Poldermans is responding to an editorial by Vineet Chopra and Kim Eagle, “Perioperative Mischief: The Price of Academic Misconduct,” which Chopra and Eagle based on a November 2011 press release: Continue reading Cardiologist accused of misconduct strikes back in a journal
The “unintentionality” of being leads to nothingness for paper on protein’s role in cancer
A group of cancer researchers in Argentina has retracted a paper on the p300 protein in breast cancer that appeared in Experimental and Molecular Pathology.
The article, titled “Intracellular distribution of p300 and its differential recruitment to aggresomes in breast cancer,” was published in 2010 by Maria E. Fermento and colleagues. It has been cited 11 times since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading The “unintentionality” of being leads to nothingness for paper on protein’s role in cancer
Toothless wonder? Paper on “oldest human fossil in Europe” temporarily removed from journal’s site
A paper about a high-profile human fossil has been mysteriously removed from the journal that published it just two weeks ago.
Here’s the notice for “The oldest human fossil in Europe dated to ca. 1.4Â Ma at Orce (Spain),” originally published on March 5: Continue reading Toothless wonder? Paper on “oldest human fossil in Europe” temporarily removed from journal’s site
“Considerable overlap” leads to retraction of medical imaging paper
We have poked fun at Pattern Recognition Letters before for failing to catch blatant plagiarism. We probably should have held off on those jokes for this post.
A group of IT researchers from India has suffered the retraction of a paper in PRL for heavily basing the piece on at least four previous papers written by one of the co-authors without proper attribution (not that such attribution likely would have absolved the sin).
The paper, titled “A robust kernelized intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm in segmentation of noisy medical images,” was published in January of this year by Prabhjot Kaur and colleagues.
Here’s the retraction notice:
Continue reading “Considerable overlap” leads to retraction of medical imaging paper