Earlier this year, Marc Halushka, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, came across a review titled simply “MicroRNA,” an unusually short title in a big field. Looking deeper into the review, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2018, Halushka found it had been cited more than 2,000 times. He thought … Continue reading Why has this microRNA review paper been cited more than 2,000 times?
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately … Continue reading Weekend reads: ChatGPT ignores retractions; the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ for flagging papers; plagiarism in the age of AI
Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating, according to a study of problematic publishing practices and the networks that fuel them. The study, published August 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined research fraud carried out by paper mills, brokers and predatory publishers. By producing low quality … Continue reading Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says
For years, sleuths – whose names our readers are likely familiar with – have been diligently flagging issues with the scientific literature. More than a dozen of these specialists have teamed up to create a set of guides to teach others their trade. The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG) aims to make “post-publication … Continue reading ‘Anyone can do this’: Sleuths publish a toolkit for post-publication review
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 58,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately … Continue reading Weekend reads: How NIH is quietly stalling research; integrity concerns found at clinical trial org; experiments in paid peer review
A genetics researcher came across an interesting paper earlier this year on the gene he studies. The scientist, a doctoral candidate who asked not to be named, decided to take a closer look at which part of the gene, SNHG14, the authors targeted to measure its expression. He ran the sequence of the short strand … Continue reading Sequence errors are ‘canaries in a coal mine’ in genetics studies, sleuth says
Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran. But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom … Continue reading Exclusive: Cancer researchers in Iran under investigation as questions swirl around dozens of studies
The corresponding author of a paper flagged on PubPeer for an apparently duplicated image will be asking the journal to publish a correction, Retraction Watch has learned. The paper, “The BET bromodomain inhibitor exerts the most potent synergistic anticancer effects with quinone-containing compounds and anti-microtubule drugs,” appeared in Oncotarget in 2016. Its authors include Marcel … Continue reading Authors – including a dean and a sleuth – correcting paper with duplicated image
Human cell lines represent key reagents for many research laboratories. Cell lines are often the first models that researchers choose for experiments such as gene manipulation and drug testing, as they are relatively accessible and inexpensive, particularly compared with mouse and other animal models. However, cell lines also are prone to contamination by other faster … Continue reading Misspelled cell lines take on new lives — and why that’s bad for the scientific literature
Publishing a research paper is usually cause for celebration, after what is typically years of effort. Our recent paper in which we found that unexpectedly high proportions of papers in two journals described at least one wrongly identified reagent should have been no exception. But alas. Any of our celebrations have been tempered by Springer … Continue reading A publisher makes an error in a publication about errors