Month: July 2023

Weekend reads: NIH defunds Colombian monkey facility; Carlo Croce loses another court battle; ‘peer review is porous’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: NIH defunds Colombian monkey facility; Carlo Croce loses another court battle; ‘peer review is porous’

Publisher blacklists authors after preprint cites made-up studies

Henrik Enghoff

Last month, a millipede expert in Denmark received an email notifying him that one of his publications had been mentioned in a new manuscript on Preprints.org. But when the researcher, Henrik Enghoff, downloaded the paper, he learned that it cited his work for something off-topic.

Stranger still, the authors of the now-withdrawn preprint, a group of researchers in China and Africa, also referenced two papers by Enghoff that he knew he hadn’t written. It turned out they didn’t exist.

“I’ve never had anything like this happen before,” Enghoff, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, told Retraction Watch.

Continue reading Publisher blacklists authors after preprint cites made-up studies

Editors of public health journal resign over differences with publisher

Lindsay McLaren
Lindsay McLaren

The co-editors in chief and most editorial board members of the journal Critical Public Health have resigned their roles to start a new, independent journal, citing differences with their publisher, Taylor & Francis. 

“While there are inevitable tensions for a critically oriented scholarly journal that is also a commodity marketed by a commercial publisher, over the last year or so it has become increasingly difficult to hold together these two different versions of the journal,” co-editors Judith Green of the University of Exeter in the UK and Lindsay McLaren of the University of Calgary in Canada said in a press release announcing the mass resignation. 

“It is simply a relationship that hasn’t worked out and we need to find other ways to continue the spirit of the community,” McLaren told us. 

Continue reading Editors of public health journal resign over differences with publisher

Scientist sues publisher to block expression of concern

Soudamani Singh

A gastroenterology researcher has sued a scientific journal to stop it from publishing an expression of concern for one of her papers. 

Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., is the middle author of “Cyclooxygenase pathway mediates the inhibition of Na-glutamine co-transporter B0AT1 in rabbit villus cells during chronic intestinal inflammation,” published in PLOS ONE in September 2018. The article has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

We previously reported that the corresponding author of the paper, Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Edwards School and chair of its department of clinical and translational science, told us he had contacted PLOS to request a correction to the article. 

Continue reading Scientist sues publisher to block expression of concern

Former UPenn prof faked more than 50 figures, says government watchdog

William Armstead

A pharmacy researcher who left the University of Pennsylvania sometime last year has been found guilty of research misconduct in multiple federal grant applications and five published papers, four of which have already been retracted.

As we have reported, William Armstead, who is retired from Penn, was working among other things on the effects of brain injury on piglets – experiments in which the animals were slaughtered. He has had seven papers retracted, and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September that he had left the university. Penn did not respond to several requests for comment when we attempted to reach officials there about Armstead’s work. 

According to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, much of that work appears to have been suspect: 

Continue reading Former UPenn prof faked more than 50 figures, says government watchdog

Weekend reads: A professor who plagiarized his students; how many postgrads in China think it’s OK to fake data; fighting fraud

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: A professor who plagiarized his students; how many postgrads in China think it’s OK to fake data; fighting fraud