November 2022 – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report

A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out.

The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months.

But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job was on the line, a colleague speculated – ran for that scientist raised suspicions. Other experiments didn’t corroborate her results, and Jiang failed to provide all her raw data.

Jiang’s benefactor asked another staff scientist to review and reanalyze her work.

What he found spurred an institutional investigation, which in July 2021 found Jiang faked data representing flow cytometry experiments in several figures included in 11 grant proposals, resulting in 19 counts of research misconduct.

Weekend reads, double edition: Science’s ‘nasty Photoshopping problem’; Dr. Oz’s publication ban; image manipulation detection software

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

This week, it’s a special double edition of Weekend Reads, thanks to a site outage that meant we couldn’t post last Saturday. The last two weeks at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 267. There are more than 36,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

How many ducks do you need to line up to get a publication retracted?

In July 2017, we notified the Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism (JBMM) of concerns about a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in rats which featured, among other problems, extensive duplication of data in a separate publication, large numbers of discrepancies in the methods and results between the publications, and serious concerns about the governance and conduct of the research.

The journal sought an explanation from the authors, Jun Iwamoto and Yoshihiro Sato, who currently have 119 retractions between them. The response avoided addressing most of the concerns and attributed all the discrepancies to minor errors, and was accepted by JBMM.

In the intervening years, however, evidence about problems in the group’s work has mounted. And yet the paper remains neither retracted nor corrected. It has become just another in a long list of studies, along with ten others in the journal, that we have beaten our heads against the wall to have journals fix.

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