The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has sanctioned a former Texas Tech postdoc for using data that had actually been generated before he joined the lab in a paper as if it were new.
Shuang-Qing Zhang, according to today’s announcement by the ORI, “engaged in research misconduct by the falsification and fabrication of plagiarized data” in a paper he claimed to have written with his supervisor, Reza Mehvar, “Determination of dextra-methylprednisolone conjugate with glycine linker in rat plasma and liver by high-performance liquid chromatography and its application in pharmacokinetics,” first published online in Biomedical Chromatography in 2009. [see update at end of post]
The work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant R01 GM069869. The ORI found that Zhang had:
- falsified Figures 2(c) and 3(c) of the BC 2010 article by misrepresenting HPLC data that he had plagiarized, originally generated prior to the Respondent’s arrival in the laboratory by a former postdoctoral researcher; in Figure 2(c), the Respondent claimed that the HPLC chromatogram was of a “plasma sample obtained 12 h after intravenous injection of DMP to rats at a single dose of 5 mg/kg,” while the actual chromatogram was of a calibration test of 1 μg/ml of DMP added to rat plasma, and similarly in Figure 3(c), the Respondent claimed that the HPLC chromatogram was of a “liver homogenate obtained 3 h after intravenous dose of DMP at a dose of 5 mg/kg,” while the actual chromatogram was of a calibration test of 2 μg/ml DMP added to rat liver homogenate.
- falsified and fabricated Figure 4 of the BC 2010 article; in the top panel, the Respondent reported the measurement of DMP concentrations in plasma samples of three rats after a single injection of 5 mg/kg DMP while the actual data that he had plagiarized, originally generated prior to the Respondent’s arrival in the laboratory by a former postdoctoral researcher, was from a single rat. In the bottom panel, the Respondent reported the measurement of DMP concentrations in liver samples obtained from three rats at 1, 30, 90, 180, 300, and 720 minutes after a single injection of 5 mg/kg DMP, requiring a total of 18 rats, while the actual data that he had plagiarized, originally generated prior to the Respondent’s arrival in the laboratory by a former postdoctoral researcher, was from plasma samples from a single rat, and the error bars for both panels were fabricated.
Zhang has agreed to have his research supervised for three years, and to not serve on any committees of the Public Health Service — the parent organization of the NIH — for the same amount of time.
The Biomedical Chromatography paper was retracted in 2010:
The following article from Biomedical Chromatography, Determination of dextra-methylprednisolone conjugate with glycine linker in rat plasma and liver by high-performance liquid chromatography and its application in pharmacokinetics by Shuang-Qing Zhang and Reza Mehvar, published online on June 1st 2009 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor in Chief, Dr Chang Kee Lim and John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. The retraction has been agreed as the research article was submitted without Dr. Mehvar’s knowledge or consent.
Update, 1:30 p.m. Eastern, 1/5/12: Texas Tech tells us that Zhang left the university in October 2008, and that no other papers would be affected.
Update, 12:45 p.m. Eastern, 11/5/13: Edited second paragraph to clarify that Zhang only claimed Mehvar had co-authored the paper, as per the Biomedical Chromatography retraction notices. Apologies for the error.