Sonia Melo, the recipient of an early career award from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) who fell under investigation after one of her papers was retracted, has now lost the grant.
On the EMBO release announcing the nine awardees of the 2015 Installation Grants, there now appears an asterisk beside Melo’s name. At the bottom of the page, this message appears: Continue reading EMBO awardee under investigation loses grant
Ben Goldacre has been a busy man. In the last six weeks, the author and medical doctor’s Compare Project has evaluated 67 clinical trials published in the top five medical journals, looking for any “switched outcomes,” meaning the authors didn’t report something they said they would, or included additional outcomes in the published paper, with no explanation for the change. The vast majority – 58 – included such discrepancies. Goldacre talked to us about how journals – New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), JAMA, The Lancet, BMJ, and Annals of Internal Medicine — have responded to this feedback.
Retraction Watch: When you discover a published trial has switched outcomes, what do you do? Continue reading Top journals give mixed response to learning published trials didn’t proceed as planned
About 13 hours after posting a satirical piece it posted at 2:00 AM today listing six hot media startups to watch in 2016, Al Jazeera America has retracted it.
The satire? Al Jazeera itself is listed as #6, even though the channel is scheduled to close down in April.
In its place is the following message: Continue reading Al Jazeera America pulls satire hours after posting, calling it “not appropriate”
The Swedish government is taking a second look at how it handles misconduct investigations.
According to a spokesperson:
Yes, we have an national investigation ongoing since last autumn. It will investigate how misconduct is investigated and handled in Sweden…
She also sent us a link to a description of the investigation, in Swedish. The outcome of the investigation is expected in November, 2016.
The inquiry predates the media implosion that’s taken place in recent months over the Karolinska Institutet’s (KI) investigation of surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who transplanted tracheas seeded with patients’ own stem cells. Continue reading Sweden, rocked by scientific scandals, re-thinking how it investigates misconduct
Mike Rossner has made a name for himself in academic publishing as somewhat of a “manipulation detective.” As the editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, in 2002 he initiated a policy of screening all images in accepted manuscripts, causing the journal to reject roughly 1% of papers that had already passed peer review. Other journals now screen images, but finding manipulation is only the first step – handling it responsibly is another matter. Rossner has started his own company to help journals and institutions manage this tricky process. We talked to him about his new venture.
Retraction Watch: What are the primary services offered by your company?
We’ve all seen the papers. You know, the ones that report a finding without citing the group that presented the same result years before. Or, more egregiously, claim outright to be the first to report it, when a simple literature search would reveal that not to be the case.
It’s a problem that affects every area of research: Authors omitting key citations, making the results appear more novel than they actually are. Sometimes it’s the result of an innocent oversight, sometimes an outright intent to deceive. The question is: Continue reading Ask Retraction Watch: What to do when papers omit relevant citations?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a correction notice to a report about formaldehyde in laminate flooring, saying a mistake had caused them to significantly underestimate the health risks.
The mistake: According to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the CDC sometimes didn’t convert feet to meters. Ouch.
In the corrected report, the agency estimates the health risks of the laminate flooring — by irritating the ear, nose and throat — to be three-fold higher than what they suggested in the original report, published February 10.
Here’s the note that now appears in the link to the original CDC report: Continue reading CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric
There’s more news to report on the story of surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who’s been dogged by allegations of misconduct.
After the Karolinska Institutet (KI) announced it would not extend his contract and that he needed to “phase out” his research by November, it has now announced it may dismiss him.
In addition, Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren, KI’s Dean of Research, has resigned.
Here’s the statement we received from a KI spokesperson:
Continue reading Macchiarini may be dismissed from Karolinska; dean of research resigns
Embattled trachea surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who has spent more than a year fighting misconduct allegations, is defending the ethical oversight behind one of his seminal papers published in The Lancet.
The 2011 paper “Tracheobronchial transplantation with a stem-cell-seeded bioartificial nanocomposite: a proof-of-concept study” described a first-of-its-kind procedure: A 36-year-old man with recurrent tracheal cancer received an artificial airway seeded with his own stem cells. The news launched Macchiarini into the stratosphere. And then the questions came. Continue reading Macchiarini defends ethics of 2011 Lancet paper
A 2012 paper co-authored by Gilles Seralini, who has published controversial research showing the dangers of genetically modified foods, has been plagiarized by another researcher.
The 2016 paper, published in the International Journal of Technical Research and Applications, has not been retracted, but the text comparison is fairly obvious.
It’s a case of intra-predatory crime: the International Journal of Technical Research and Applications is on the list of predatory journals compiled by Jeffrey Beall, and the Seralini paper appeared in the Journal of Environmental Protection, which is published by Scientific Research Publishing, which Beall considers to be a predatory publisher.
Here’s the abstract from Seralini’s 2012 paper, “Glyphosate Exposure in a Farmer’s Family:” Continue reading Seralini paper released by predatory publisher is plagiarized by predatory journal