Author: Alison McCook

Karolinska requests retraction of 2014 Macchiarini paper

Paolo Macchiarini

It has been a tough couple of years for surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, once lauded for pioneering a groundbreaking procedure to transplant tracheas.

After a series of documentaries prompted his former employer, Karolinska Institutet (KI), to reopen a misconduct investigation against him, KI has today released one verdict regarding a 2014 Nature Communications paper: guilty.

KI said it is contacting the journal to request a retraction of the paper, which has already been flagged with an expression of concern.

Here’s more from a release from the institution: Continue reading Karolinska requests retraction of 2014 Macchiarini paper

Spam me once, shame on you. (Academic) spam me 3000 times…?

Every year, academics get thousands of spam emails inviting them to submit manuscripts or attend conferences — but don’t bother asking to “unsubscribe” for Christmas.

Spoiler alert, for those of you planning to read the rest of this post: It doesn’t make much of a difference.

That’s according to the conclusions of a study published in one of our favorite issues of the BMJ  — the Christmas issue. After a group of five self-described “intrepid academics” tried to unsubscribe from the 300+ spam invitations they received on average each month, the volume decreased by only 19% after one year.

Not surprisingly, many emails — approximately 1 in 6 — were duplicates (aka “reheated spam”), and the vast majority (83%) had little relevance to the researchers’ interests.

Study author Andrew Grey at the University of Auckland told us that since it’s the BMJ Christmas issue, they wanted to have a bit of fun. But it’s not an all-together light topic, he noted: Continue reading Spam me once, shame on you. (Academic) spam me 3000 times…?

UCLA lab pulls two papers — one by author who admitted to misconduct

A lab at the University of California, Los Angeles has retracted two papers for duplicated images.

These retractions — in the Journal of Immunology — represent the second and third retractions for the lab head; he lost another paper after one of his former students confessed to manipulating images.

Although Eriko Suzuki admitted to her actions on PubPeer in 2014, the 2007 Oncogene paper wasn’t retracted until June, 2016, when the journal issued a notice citing “data irregularities.”

Unfortunately, Suzuki’s admission in 2014 wasn’t the end of the troubles for lab head Benjamin Bonavida, who recently issued two additional retractions in the Journal of Immunology, only one of which includes Suzuki as a co-author.

Bonavida told us the university received allegations (he’s not sure from who) that some of the control gels were duplicated; he didn’t agree, but couldn’t produce the original gels to disprove it. We asked if any more retractions were coming from Bonavida, who has since retired from running a lab:

Continue reading UCLA lab pulls two papers — one by author who admitted to misconduct

Dear peer reviewer, you stole my paper: An author’s worst nightmare

“Deeply disturbing,” “heinous intellectual theft,” erosion of the “public’s trust in medical research:” These are just a few words used to describe a rare type of plagiarism reported in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine.

Although we’ve only documented a few cases where peer reviewers steal material from manuscripts and pass them off as their own, it does happen, and it’s a fear of many authors. What we’ve never seen is a plagiarized author publish a letter to the reviewer who stole his work. But after Michael Dansinger of Tufts Medical Center realized a paper he’d submitted to Annals of Internal Medicine that had been rejected was republished, and the journal recognized one of the reviewers among the list of co-authors, it published a letter from Dansinger to the reviewer, along with an editorial explaining what happened.

The letter and editorial identify the paper containing the stolen material — now retracted — but don’t name the reviewer responsible. Still, the articles are deeply personal. As Dansinger writes in “Dear Plagiarist: A Letter to a Peer Reviewer Who Stole and Published Our Manuscript as His Own,” the reviewer took much more than just a manuscript:

Continue reading Dear peer reviewer, you stole my paper: An author’s worst nightmare

Journal’s new program: Choose your own reviewers – and get a decision in days

Michael Imperiale

Peer review has numerous problems: Researchers complain it takes too long, but also sometimes that it is not thorough enough, letting obviously flawed papers enter the literature. Authors are often in the best position to know who the best experts are in their field, but how can we be sure they’ll choose someone who won’t just rubber stamp their paper? A new journal – mSphere, an open-access microbial sciences journal only one year old – has proposed a new solution. Early next year, they’re launching a project they call mSphereDirect in order to improve the publication process for authors. We spoke with Mike Imperiale, editor-in-chief at mSphere, about how this system will work.

Retraction Watch: So let’s start with how the program will work, exactly. Can you explain?  Continue reading Journal’s new program: Choose your own reviewers – and get a decision in days

“A sinking feeling in my gut:” Diary of a retraction

Daniel Bolnick is photographed at HHMI’s Janelia Farms campus on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013 in Ashburn, Va. (Kevin Wolf/AP Images for HHMI)

When an ecologist realized he’d made a fatal error in a 2009 paper, he did the right thing: He immediately contacted the journal (Evolutionary Ecology Research) to ask for a retraction. But he didn’t stop there: He wrote a detailed blog post outlining how he learned — in October 2016, after a colleague couldn’t recreate his data — he had misused a statistical tool (using R programing), which ended up negating his findings entirely. We spoke to Daniel Bolnick at the University of Texas at Austin (and an early career scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) about what went wrong with his paper “Diet similarity declines with morphological distance between conspecific individuals,” and why he chose to be so forthright about it.

Retraction Watch: You raise a good point in your explanation of what went wrong with the statistical analysis: Eyeballing the data, they didn’t look significant. But when you plugged in the numbers (it turns out, incorrectly), they were significant – albeit weakly. So you reported the result. Did this teach you the importance of trusting your gut, and the so-called “eye-test” when looking at data? Continue reading “A sinking feeling in my gut:” Diary of a retraction

PubPeer wins appeal of court ruling to unmask commenters

Fazlul Sarkar

PubPeer is having a good day.

In a new ruling, a trio of judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed a 2015 decision mandating the site reveal the identity of anonymous commenters after a scientist sued them, claiming they cost him a job offer.

The judges stated that Fazlul Sarkar, the scientist suing the commenters, can continue pursuing a defamation case, but: Continue reading PubPeer wins appeal of court ruling to unmask commenters

Sleuthing out scientific fraud, pixel by pixel

lars-koppers
Lars Koppers

When it comes to detecting image manipulation, the more tools you have at your disposal, the better. In a recent issue of Science and Engineering Ethics, Lars Koppers at TU Dortmund University in Germany and his colleagues present a new way to scan images. Specifically, they created an open-source software that compares pixels within or between images, looking for similarities, which can signify portions of an image has been duplicated or deleted. Koppers spoke with us about the program described in “Towards a Systematic Screening Tool for Quality Assurance and Semiautomatic Fraud Detection for Images in the Life Sciences,” and how it can be used by others to sleuth out fraud.

Retraction Watch: Can you briefly describe how your screening system works?

Continue reading Sleuthing out scientific fraud, pixel by pixel

Retractions holding steady at more than 650 in FY2016

pubmedDrumroll please.

The tally of retractions in MEDLINE — one of the world’s largest databases of scientific abstracts — for the last fiscal year has just been released, and the number is: 664.

Earlier this year, we scratched our heads over the data from 2015, which showed retractions had risen dramatically, to 684. The figures for this fiscal year — which ended in September — have held relatively steadily at that higher number, only dropping by 3%. (For some sense of scale, there were just shy of 870,000 new abstracts indexed in MEDLINE in FY2016; 664 is a tiny fraction of this figure, and of course not all of the retractions were of papers published in FY2016.)

Of note: In FY2014, there were fewer than 500 retractions — creating an increase of nearly 40% between 2014 and 2015. (Meanwhile, the number of citations indexed by MEDLINE rose only few percentage points over the same time period.) Which means the retraction rate in the last two years is dramatically higher than in 2014.

We have often wondered whether the retraction rate would ever reach a plateau, as the community’s ability to find problems in the literature catches up with the amount of problems present in the literature. But based on two years of data, we can’t say anything definitive about that.

Here’s an illustration of retraction data from recent years:

Continue reading Retractions holding steady at more than 650 in FY2016

Stolen data prompts Science to flag debated study of fish and plastics

scienceIn August, Science told us it was considering adding an Expression of Concern to a high-profile paper about how human pollution is harming fish — and yesterday, the journal did it.

The move comes after a group of researchers alleged the paper contains missing data, and the authors followed a problematic methodology. In September, however, the co-authors’ institution, Uppsala University in Sweden, concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to launch a misconduct investigation.

The notice from Science stems from the theft of a computer carrying some of the paper’s raw data, making it impossible to reproduce some of its findings: Continue reading Stolen data prompts Science to flag debated study of fish and plastics