The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction of a state senator’s paper, and an editor busted for citation boosting. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: The upside of predatory publishers; why no one replicates; the pain of manuscript submission
Year: 2017
Unusual: Neurology removes author dinged for misconduct from 2016 paper
Neurology has partially retracted a 2016 paper, replacing a figure and removing the author who contributed it after he was found guilty of misconduct.
The journal has replaced the figure with a new one that confirmed the findings of the original, and swapped the name of Andrew Cullinane with the scientist who constructed the new figure using a new dataset. Last year, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity declared that Cullinane had falsified data in this paper and one other while working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Medical Genetics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).
Cullinane appears to be at Howard University in Washington D.C., according to his LinkedIn page. He is listed as an assistant professor in the Basic Sciences/Anatomy department of the university’s College of Medicine.
Here’s the partial retraction notice from the journal:
Continue reading Unusual: Neurology removes author dinged for misconduct from 2016 paper
Editor resigns from two journals after “considerable” citation boosting attempts
An editor at two European Geosciences Union journals has resigned following revelations that he or she engaged in citation manipulation — boosting citations to his or her own papers and associated journals.
Here’s a letter announcing the news, signed by EGU publication committee chair Hubert Savenije, that ran in several EGU journals earlier this week: Continue reading Editor resigns from two journals after “considerable” citation boosting attempts
Cancer biologist stops research as his retraction count rises to 13
A cancer biologist based at the University of Maryland is transitioning out of research, as a journal has retracted three more of his papers.
Anil Jaiswal has now lost 13 papers, including, as we reported on February 6, six retractions issued earlier this month.
The Baltimore Sun reported this week that Jaiswal would no longer be conducting research at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which we confirmed from a spokesperson:
Continue reading Cancer biologist stops research as his retraction count rises to 13
“Social science isn’t definitive like chemistry:” Embattled food researcher defends his work
It’s been a busy few months for Brian Wansink, a prominent food researcher at Cornell University. A blog post he wrote in November prompted a huge backlash from readers who accused him of using problematic research methods to produce questionable data, and a group of researchers suggested four of his papers contained 150 inconsistencies. The scientist has since announced he’s asked a non-author to reanalyze the data — a researcher in his own lab. Meanwhile, criticisms continue to mount. We spoke with Wansink about the backlash, and how he hopes to answer his critics’ questions.
Retraction Watch: Why not engage someone outside your lab to revalidate the analysis of the four papers under question?
A “plethora of data errors” prompts authors to retract oncology paper
Researchers in China have retracted a 2016 cancer imaging paper because they introduced “a plethora of data errors” while preparing the article for submission.
Although the retraction notice provides no details on what these errors are or how exactly they occurred, it does point the finger at the researchers, explaining that the data errors happened as a result of their “negligence.”
Here’s the 2017 retraction notice for “Rituximab-conjugated, doxorubicin-loaded microbubbles as a theranostic modality in B-cell lymphoma,” published November 25, 2016 in Oncotarget: Continue reading A “plethora of data errors” prompts authors to retract oncology paper
Researcher issues massive changes to papers amidst plagiarism investigation
A researcher in Greece has issued extensive — what we sometimes call “mega” — corrections to two 2016 papers published in a medical journal in Romania.
The first author — Alexandra Kalogeraki, a pathology researcher at the University of Crete in Greece — retracted two reviews from the same journal last year for plagiarism. The newest notices remove authors and correct, add, or remove text, often without providing an explicit reason for the change.
The journal told us Kalogeraki initially asked to retract the newly corrected papers, but the editors didn’t believe that the papers warranted the harsher measure, as they’d run a plagiarism scan and conducted peer review of the two papers and did not find any issues. However, the University of Crete is currently investigating allegations of plagiarism in two of Kalogeraki’s other papers, which have already been retracted by the same journal.
For the latest mega-corrections, both are so lengthy we’re only including a small portion of the notice for the case study, “Recurrent Cerebellar Desmoplastic/ Nodular Medulloblastoma in Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) in the elderly. A Cytologic Diagnosis,” which deals with authorship: Continue reading Researcher issues massive changes to papers amidst plagiarism investigation
Researchers disagree over how to explain doubts over physics findings
After an international group of physicists agreed that the findings of their 2015 paper were in doubt, they simply couldn’t agree on how to explain what went wrong. Apparently tired of waiting, the journal retracted the paper anyway.
The resulting notice doesn’t say much, for obvious reasons. Apparently, some additional information came to light which caused the researchers to question the results and model. Although the five authors thought a retraction was the right call, they could not agree on the language in the notice.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Atomistic simulation of damage accumulation and amorphization in Ge,” published online February 2015 in the Journal of Applied Physics (JAP) and retracted two years later in January 2017: Continue reading Researchers disagree over how to explain doubts over physics findings
Researcher sued to stop retractions; he just earned two more and is now up to 11
The notices keep coming for diabetes researcher Mario Saad.
Diabetes has just retracted two more of his papers, both of which had been flagged by expressions of concern, citing problems with duplications. What’s more, the journal added another expression of concern to a 2009 paper on which Saad — based at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil — is listed as last author, again over concerns of duplication.
This isn’t Saad’s first run-in with the journal: In 2015, the researcher sued the publisher, the American Diabetes Association, after it issued expressions of concern for four of his papers. Later that year, a judge dismissed Saad’s defamation suit. The journal eventually retracted the papers.
The latest articles flagged by Diabetes appear to be part of an intricate publishing web, as the journal suggests all papers have used features of previous papers, and also include elements that have been republished by subsequent articles.
Here’s the first retraction notice, for “A Central Role for Neuronal AMP-Activated Protein Kinase (AMPK) and Mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) in High-Protein Diet–Induced Weight Loss:”
Continue reading Researcher sued to stop retractions; he just earned two more and is now up to 11
Does a paywall protect patient privacy?
A psychoanalyst has retracted an award-winning 2016 paper over concerns that it contained “sensitive” patient information.
On July 15, Judith L. Mitrani, a psychoanalyst based in California, published an article that included “sensitive clinical material” about a patient. Although we do not know what prompted the concerns, on November 21, Mitrani, in agreement with the journal’s editor-in-chief and publisher, retracted the article. The author and editor told us the retraction was meant to prevent non-experts from accessing the paper and to stop other non-Wiley sites from posting it.
The article was published after it had won the journal’s essay contest in 2015.
Here’s the retraction notice for “On Separating One from the Other: Images of a Developing Self,” published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy (BJP):