The carcasses are piling up.
Jesús A. Lemus now has eight retractions. Here’s the notice for the most recent: Continue reading Jesús Lemus notches his eighth retraction
Month: March 2013
Another win for transparency: JBC takes a step forward, adding details to some retraction notices
Retraction Watch readers may recall that we have been frequent critics of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) — published by the American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB) — for their opaque retraction notices. Such notices often read simply “This article has been withdrawn by the authors.”
But we are — despite what some might say is evidence to the contrary — eternal optimists, so when the ASBMB announced they were hiring a manager of publication ethics late last year, we cheered. (Patricia Valdez, a former NIH staff scientist, has since filled that position.) And today, we have another reason to say “Hurrah!”: JBC retraction notices will now include “additional details provided by official [Office of Research Integrity] ORI or institutional reports,” the journal tells us.
Here, for example, are five retractions in the March 1, 2013, issue by former University of Kentucky scientist Eric J. Smart, whom the ORI found to have faked dozens of images: Continue reading Another win for transparency: JBC takes a step forward, adding details to some retraction notices
More HeLa problems: For decades, a widely used bladder cancer line hasn’t been what scientists thought
About a year ago, we wrote about the retraction of a paper in Oral Oncology that highlighted a big issue in oncology research: Widespread contamination of cancer cell lines by other lines, making findings difficult to interpret.
One of the common contaminants is HeLa cells. HeLa, of course, stands for Henrietta Lacks, the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. As we noted last year, Continue reading More HeLa problems: For decades, a widely used bladder cancer line hasn’t been what scientists thought
Mobile phone-diabetes study rings twice, earns retraction
The Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders has retracted a 2012 study by a group of Iranian researchers. The reason: the authors had published the paper three years earlier, in a different journal.
Here’s the notice for the article, titled “Mobile phone text messaging and Telephone follow-up in type 2 diabetic patients for 3 months: a comparative study”: Continue reading Mobile phone-diabetes study rings twice, earns retraction
How much self-plagiarism, aka duplication, is too much?
Duplication is a frequent reason for the retractions we cover. Such duplication retractions are so common that we don’t get to most of them. While many have argued that duplication pollutes the literature, and can bias meta-analyses when the same study ends up being counted more than once, others say the need to come up with new ways to say the same thing is a waste of time. (That doesn’t explain why some scientists don’t just put their old words in quotes and cite them, but we digress.)
Appropriately, the Committee on Publication Ethics is taking up the issue at their regular forum tomorrow, using new guidelines produced by BioMedCentral as a starting point. Here’s an excerpt: Continue reading How much self-plagiarism, aka duplication, is too much?
Study plagiarizes so many other papers, retraction notice can’t list them all
In a new retraction notice, the Journal of Controlled Release is living up to its name.
The editor-in-chief has retracted a study that plagiarized “a large number” of papers, but only three are listed in the notice. Here’s the notice for “In situ-forming hydrogels for sustained ophthalmic drug delivery,” by Basavaraj K. Nanjawade, F.V. Manvi, and A.S. Manjappa, three researchers at India’s KLES’s College of Pharmacy, JN Medical College Campus, Karnataka: Continue reading Study plagiarizes so many other papers, retraction notice can’t list them all
Double dipping on exercise/cardiac risk paper leads to retraction
The International Journal of Neuroscience has retracted a September 2005 paper by a group from Turkey who published the same article in the same month in a different journal.
The research involved looking at concentrations of blood fats in athletes and less vigorous folk, “and to examine the risks of cardiovascular diseases.”It found that:
… medium and high level of exercises did not cause significant differences in lipid and lipoprotein levels, but the sex differences were very pronounced” with “lipid and lipoprotein profile of female subjects was found to be better than that of males”.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Double dipping on exercise/cardiac risk paper leads to retraction
Oh, the irony: Business ethics journal paper retracted for plagiarism
Is this the new business ethics?
In January, we reported on a paper retracted from the Journal of Business Ethics for duplication. That earned the author a five-year publishing ban. This week, we learned of a case of plagiarism in another journal in the field, the Journal of Academic and Business Ethics. Here’s an email editor Russell Baker — no, not that Russell Baker — sent to his contact list on Wednesday: Continue reading Oh, the irony: Business ethics journal paper retracted for plagiarism
“What I find offensive is not that they plagiarized us, it’s that they did it so badly”
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the work of Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist who has taken a tough stance about many of the problems in his field and coordinates the Reproducibility Project. So it must have seemed quite ironic for Nosek and his co-authors to learn today that one of their papers had been outrageously — and badly — plagiarized.
Here’s the abstract of the work by Nosek, Jesse Graham, and others, which hasn’t been published in a journal yet but is posted at Nosek’s website: Continue reading “What I find offensive is not that they plagiarized us, it’s that they did it so badly”
Wash U psychologist sheds light on inquiry against former psychology grad student
On Tuesday, we reported on the case of Adam Savine, a former graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis who was found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have committed misconduct.
Today, Blythe Bernhard, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has an illuminating Q and A with Todd Braver, whose lab Savine worked in. Savine’s former mentor offers a few interesting details about the investigation into his former student.
Braver tells the paper that he’d had doubts about the integrity of Savine’s data as the student was preparing for his dissertation defense in August 2012: Continue reading Wash U psychologist sheds light on inquiry against former psychology grad student