We have obtained a copy of the report that led to the investigation of Jens Förster, the social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, which is calling for the retraction of a 2012 article by the researcher for manipulated data.
As we reported earlier, Förster has denied any wrongdoing in the matter.
Continue reading Anatomy of an inquiry: The report that led to the Jens Förster investigation
Retraction Watch has obtained an email from Jens Förster, the social psychologist in the Netherlands who, as Dutch media reported this week, was the target of a misconduct investigation at the University of Amsterdam. The inquiry led to the call for the retraction of a paper by Förster and a colleague, Markus Denzler, over concerns of data manipulation.
Förster denies those claims and said Denzler was not involved in the heavy lifting for the study in question: Continue reading Social psychologist Förster denies misconduct, calls charge “terrible misjudgment”
In February we reported on the case of Fred Walumbwa, a leadership scholar at Florida International University who was poised to lose five papers in the Leadership Quarterly for reasons not entirely clear but which appeared to involve problems with the data.
Now we see a sixth retraction for Walumbwa, this one in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. The article, titled (ironically enough), “Authentically leading groups: The mediating role of collective psychological capital and trust,” had appeared in September 2009. Per the abstract:
Continue reading Florida leadership researcher Walumbwa notches sixth retraction
The University of Amsterdam has called for the retraction of a 2011 paper by two psychology researchers after a school investigation concluded that the article contained bogus data, the Dutch press are reporting.
The paper, “Sense Creative! The Impact of Global and Local Vision, Hearing, Touching, Tasting and Smelling on Creative and Analytic Thought,” was written by Jens Förster and Markus Denzler and published in Social Psychological & Personality Science. It purported to find that:
Continue reading New Dutch psychology scandal? Inquiry cites data manipulation, calls for retraction
Blood has an interesting retraction of a 2011 paper on what a group of authors claimed was a new cell line — but which proved, apparently, to be a chimera.
The article, “Oxygen-regulated expression of the erythropoietin gene in the human renal cell line REPC,” came from a team at Universität Duisburg-Essen, in Germany, and has been cited 21 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the abstract: Continue reading Contaminated cells force retraction of Blood paper
A duo of former University of Queensland researchers have had a third article retracted following an investigation into 92 papers.
In September, Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood had a paper in the European Journal of Neurology retracted. Earlier this month, the same happened to a paper in Aphasiology.
The retraction announced by the university today is for a 2013 paper in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
Here’s the notice, which is brief and behind a paywall: Continue reading University of Queensland investigation leads to third retraction
Two researchers at the University of Maryland who retracted a paper earlier this year for a duplicated figure have withdrawn another, this time for unknown reasons.
The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) paper has been cited 16 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice, for “Hsp90 Interaction with INrf2(Keap1) Mediates Stress-induced Nrf2 Activation,” which is unfortunately a return to the JBC’s opacity: Continue reading University of Maryland researchers notch second retraction
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, which kicked off with our announcement that we’re hiring a paid intern. Here’s what was happening elsewhere around the web: Continue reading Weekend reads: Self-plagiarism and moral panic; sexism in science; peer review under scrutiny
A group of authors at the University of Oklahoma have retracted a 2013 paper on ethics training after the university found that the data they used couldn’t be shared publicly.
Here’s the notice for “Improving Case-Based Ethics Training: How Modeling Behaviors and Forecasting Influence Effectiveness:” Continue reading Ethics training paper retracted because data couldn’t be shared
A former postdoc at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York faked data in four published papers, one submitted manuscript, and four NIH grant applications, according to new findings by the Office of Research Integrity.
We reported on six retractions from Savio Woo’s Mount Sinai lab in 2010, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and two each from Human Gene Therapy and Molecular Therapy. The PNAS paper, as we noted then:
claimed to have discovered a possible cure for phenylketonuria, or PKU, in mice—a finding that was cited more than 30 times and trumpeted in the media.
At the time, Mount Sinai said that two of the lab’s postdocs had been dismissed for misconduct. Now, more than three and a half years later, the ORI reports that a former postdoc in that lab, Li Chen: Continue reading Former Mount Sinai postdoc faked gene therapy data: ORI