A study that claimed a highly controversial “abortion reversal” method was effective — and which was temporarily removed from a journal’s site — has been republished.
While there are some wording changes in the new version, they don’t seem to clarify much about what happened before and during the study. Continue reading A study of an “abortion reversal” method has been republished — but its mystery deepens
Journals have retracted all but 19 of the 313 tainted papers linked to three of the most notorious fraudsters in science, with only stragglers left in the literature. But editors and publishers have been less diligent when it comes to delivering optimal retraction notices for the affected articles.
That’s the verdict of a new analysis in the journal Anaesthesia, which found that 15% of retraction notices for the affected papers fail fully to meet standards from the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE). Many lacked appropriate language and requisite watermarks stating that the articles had been removed, and some have vanished from the literature.
The article was written by U. M. McHugh, of University Hospital in Galway, Ireland, and Steven Yentis, a consultant anaesthetist at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in London. Yentis was editor of Anaesthesia during the three scandals and had a first-hand view of two of the investigations. He also is the editor who unleashed anesthetist and self-trained statistician John Carlisle on the Fujii papers to see how likely the Japanese researcher’s data were to be valid (answer: not very likely). Continue reading When it comes to retracting papers by the world’s most prolific scientific fraudsters, journals have room for improvement
They is MDPI Proceedings, which has pulled a 2017 paper, “Role of Happiness as a Habitual Process.” The reason: Continue reading It’s official: They’ve retracted happiness.
Five journals published by a prominent cancer research society have retracted a total of 10 papers — most of them by a former researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Nine of the 10 retractions share that researcher, Bharat Aggarwal, as an author. Aggarwal — who more than five years ago threatened to sue us for reporting on an investigation into his work — is now up to 28 retractions, and has left his post at MD Anderson. The AACR is also appending an editor’s note to eight of his other papers — but it has not explained the reason for what it acknowledges is a lag in moving on these articles.
“Unfortunately, we have been delayed in correcting the published record, and for this we apologize,” writes the publisher of The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), Christine Rullo, in a note in this month’s issue of Cancer Research. Rullo doesn’t say how long the journals took to handle the retractions. Continue reading Cancer journals retract 10 papers, flag 8 more, and apologize for the delay
A lab at the University of Malaya has lost two papers and will have to correct five more — just from one publisher — over poor lab practices.
One of the retracted papers paper tested the effects of a plant on liver damage; its notice says the paper contains overlap with another paper from the same lab that tested a different plant for the same effect — but to save time and cut costs, the authors tested both plants in animals at the same time, and collected their tissues using one kit and protocol.
The publisher (Hindawi) decided to take a second look at the work coming out of the lab of Mahmood Ameen Abdulla after people raised questions about some of his previous work, including a Scientific Reports paper that was corrected for mistaken duplications, according to Matt Hodgkinson, the head of research integrity at Hindawi. After Hindawi spotted problems, it contacted the institution, which investigated.
According to Hodgkinson, the UM investigation concluded the problems were due to errors, not deliberate misconduct. Hindawi plans to correct five more papers from Abdulla’s lab, after consulting with Hindawi’s board members following UM’s investigation:
For the second time in a week, we’ve come across a retraction notice that gave the wrong reason for the retraction.
Last week, it was an Elsevier journal that called a plagiarized paper a duplicate of work by the same authors who’d written the original. Today, here’s the story of a chapter in a book published by Springer Nature that manages to list two different reasons for retraction.
According to one notice for “In-silico Analysis of LncRNA-mRNA Target Prediction” in: D. Reddy Edla et al. (eds.), Advances in Machine Learning and Data Science, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 705, the chapter was retracted for plagiarism.
But according to the other notice, the retraction happened because Continue reading One retraction notice says plagiarism. The other says it was an error in an algorithm. Which was it?
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The week at Retraction Watch featured a high-profile paper about cataract surgery and the risk of death that turned out to be wrong; a press release retraction following outrage over a study of trans teens; and a UConn researcher who “recklessly” used false data in grant applications. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: China’s black market in publishing; no fraud in NgAgo gene editing work, says university; predatory journal crackdown