A preprint about millipedes that was written using OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT is back online after being withdrawn for including made-up references, Retraction Watch has learned.
The paper, fake references and all, is also under review by a journal specializing in tropical insects.
“This undermines trust in the scientific literature,” said Henrik Enghoff, a millipede researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, who first spotted problems with the preprint, as we reported last month.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whose resignation as president of Stanford University becomes effective today, is retracting two papers from Science following an institutional investigation that found data manipulation in multiple figures.
Anonymous users on PubPeer postedconcerns about potentially manipulated images in the papers as early as 2015. Reporting by The Stanford Daily in November 2022 spurred the university to launch an investigation into several of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers, how he responded when others identified issues in his articles, and the culture of his lab.
The university published the final report last month, finding that four of the five papers it reviewed on which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author contained “apparent manipulation of research data by others.” Tessier-Lavigne, the investigation committee concluded:
A former researcher at the University of Utah has filed for a temporary restraining order against the U.S. government agency that last week barred her from receiving federal funds.
Ivana Frech – formerly Ivana De Domenico – “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating” images in three different papers whose work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). ORI barred Frech from receiving federal funding for three years starting on August 21, making no mention of whether she agreed to the sanctions.
But on August 29, Jackson Nichols, an attorney representing Frech, filed for a temporary restraining order against the Department of Health and Human Services. The complaint in the case is under seal, and the summons refer only to a “suit to enjoin further action by U.S. government agency” under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Neither Nichols nor Frech immediately responded to Retraction Watch’s request for comment about the goals of the lawsuit, but the filing is consistent with others aimed at blocking such debarments.
The case dates back to at least 2012, when Frech and colleagues retracted two papers from Cell Metabolism. As we reported at the time, Jerry Kaplan, the senior author of those papers, said “the data were lost when an employee, who was dismissed, discarded lab notebooks without permission.” That employee – who was not a co-author of the paper – was a technician, Kaplan said. “This occurred prior to the identification of errors in the manuscripts and was reported at that time to the University authorities.”
On July 21, Derek Woollins received an email asking that an article be withdrawn from a journal he supposedly helped edit.
But although Woollins was listed on the journal’s website as a member of its editorial board, he had never even heard of the publication.
Woollins, a professor of synthetic chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, later learned that he is also listed on the editorial board of other journals from the same publisher – Scholars Research Library – again, with no involvement in any of them. (Some academics have even found themselves listed as editors in chief of journals they have nothing to do with.)
A former chemistry professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville admitted to reusing data in grant applications to the National Institutes of Health while claiming that it came from different experiments, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
Surangi (Suranji) Jayawardena, who joined the UAH faculty in 2017 following a postdoc at MIT, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data in twelve (12) figure panels” in four grant applications in 2018 and 2019, the ORI said. All of the applications were administratively withdrawn by the agency, one in 2019 and three in 2021.
Jayawardena studied ways to rapidly diagnose tuberculosis, and to deliver drugs to treat various bacteria. She does not appear to have had any papers retracted.
An article published last January in a physics journal attracted attention for its conclusion that–contrary to mainstream climate science–extreme weather events have not become more intense or more frequent as the temperature of the earth’s surface has increased.
Now, the journal’s editors have retracted the article after a post-publication review found “that the conclusions of the article were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors.”
A study by two economists who found opening strip clubs or escort services caused sex crimes in the neighborhood to drop contains “fatal errors” and should be retracted, argues a group of past and current law enforcement officers, including three academics.
“None of us are prudes or even anti-strip club,” Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore police officer, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter). “But if you claim strip clubs reduce sex crimes – and by 13 percent! – you’re delving into serious policy issues.”
He added: “This is very typical of academics getting out of their field. They have second-hand data. They crunch the numbers … They don’t know what the data mean.”
Nearly four years after a critic pointed out flaws in a paper about a controversial research tool involved in nearly 20 retractions, the owner of that instrument has lost the article after he failed to overcome the editors’ concerns about the work.
The owner is Donald Morisky, of the University of California, Los Angeles, whose name should be well-familiar to readers of Retraction Watch.
Morisky developed the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), then began charging researchers up to six-figure sums to license the use of the tool in their own studies. Those who didn’t sign agreements in advance were ordered to retract their papers that used the MMAS, pay Morisky’s company retroactively, or risk legal action. (We wrote about all this in Science back in 2017. We also wrote about how Morisky and his former business partner, Steve Trubow, have been engaged in litigation over ownership of a spin-off “widget” Trubow says belongs to him. That case is ongoing.)
Two institutional investigations that concluded in 2016 and 2019 found scientific misconduct in multiple publications from the lab of a leading urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Retraction Watch has learned.
The investigations could not determine who had manipulated the published images of experimental data, but the 2019 report concluded that Rajvir Dahiya, also director of the urology research center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “was senior/last author on all these publications and therefore responsible for the results.” Dahiya retired in 2020.
The two investigation reports, which we obtained through a public records request, along with the reports from the preliminary inquiries preceding the investigations, recommend notifying the journals that published eight papers of the issues identified. Four have so far been retracted, one corrected, and two marked with expressions of concern. One of those expressions of concern was published last month.
In comments to Retraction Watch, Dahiya blamed the findings that research misconduct occurred in his lab on the age of the papers. He said the VA destroyed notebooks with original data that had been stored in a central facility after the required data retention period had lapsed:
