Adam Marcus

Disgraced Korea scholar, formerly of Columbia, loses paper for plagiarism

A former historian at Columbia University who resigned last year in the wake of a plagiarism scandal involving his award-winning book on North Korea has lost a 2005 paper for misusing his sources.

In 2017, Charles Armstrong, once a leading figure in Korean scholarship, returned the 2014 John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Society after allegations emerged that he had plagiziared widely in his book, “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”

At the time, Armstrong admitted to having made “citation errors” in the work. However, Balazs Szalontai, an academic in Korea, insisted that the the errors were in fact plagiarism and that they were sweeping.

Now, in what Szalotai told us was the earliest instance of Armstrong’s plagiarism that he has found, the journal Cold War History is retracting an article by Armstrong. According to the notice:

Authors retract Nature paper on dramatic increases in streamflow from deforestation

The authors of a 2019 Nature paper on hydrology have retracted it after commenters pointed out a slew of errors with the work.

The article, “Global analysis of streamflow response to forest management,” was written by Jaivime Evaristo, of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, in The Netherlands, and Jeffrey McDonnell, of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada. In it, Evaristo and McDonnell produced an estimate of the effects of deforestation on the volume of the world’s rivers.

Their conclusion: “forest removal can lead to increases in streamflow that are around 3.4 times greater than the mean annual runoff of the Amazon River” — nearly enough to double the volume of all the world’s rivers in total.

Disturbing (for those of us not in the field) thought experiment aside, the estimate turns out to be off the mark.

The retraction notice states:

A paper on cats and female students uses up one of its nine lives

Facing a social media storm, a biology journal has temporarily removed a paper arguing that the proliferation of feral cats around university campuses in China is directly related to the proportion of female students — who evidently are more welcoming than men of the wild felines.

The article, “Where there are girls, there are cats,” appeared in Biological Conservation, launching a withering Tweet storm with, at last count, more than 275 replies. The comments ranged from incredulous to outraged, with at least one user noting that the paper was submitted, revised and accepted within a period of about 10 days.

Fourth retraction for Haruko Obokata, focus of STAP cell scandal, after Harvard investigation

More than five years after Nature retracted two highly suspect papers about what had been described as a major breakthrough in stem cell research, another journal has pulled a paper about the work.

The scandal over so-called STAP stem cells took down more than just a few articles. The case centered on Haruko Obokata, a Japanese researcher who conducted the studies as a post-doc in the Harvard lab of Charles Vacanti. Obokata lost her doctoral thesis from Waseda University in 2015 because it plagiarized from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She also retracted a paper in Nature Protocols.

Harvard group retracts Nature paper

A group of researchers based at Harvard University have retracted an influential 2017 letter in Nature after a change in lab personnel led to the discovery of errors in the analysis.

The article, “Microglia-dependent synapse loss in type I interferon-mediated lupus,” emerged from a collaboration including scientists at Harvard Medical School, the Rockefeller University in New York City, the University of Magdeburg, in Germany.

The senior author of the research letter — which has been cited 75 times, earning it a highly cited designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was Michael C. Carroll, a prominent immunology researcher. [See disclosure at the end of this post.] Also on the list was Ronald Herbst, who at the time was vice president of research at MedImmune but has since left that company for another biotech firm. The first author was Allison Bialas, at the time a post-doc at Harvard.

According to the abstract:

‘Those unfortunate events:’ Second retraction for stem cell scientist in Canada accused of misconduct

McMaster’s University Hall, via Wikipedia

Citing a misconduct investigation, the journal Stem Cells has retracted a 2009 article coauthored by a researcher whose work has been under suspicion for roughly five years.

The paper was titled “Cell adhesion and spreading affect adipogenesis from embryonic stem cells: the role of calreticulin.” The retraction notice, which is behind a paywall, states:

Journal flags papers two years after university investigation finds researcher faked data

Nearly two years after a University of Liverpool investigation determined that a former researcher there fabricated his data, the journal Molecular Medicine has issued expressions of concern about four papers by that researcher.

As we reported in 2018, Daniel J. Antoine — once a promising young liver specialist — was found to have made up much of his spectroscopic findings. According to the university:

Entire board of law journal resigns in a ‘small act of resistance’

The defense resigns.

The entire editorial board of the European Law Journal, along with its two top editors, has quit over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley.

In a statement posted on the blog of the European Law Blog, editors-in-chief Joana Mendes, of the University of Luxembourg, and Harm Schepel, of the University of Kent, in England, wrote:

Michigan State committee finds misconduct by museum head in celebrated mummy case

An investigation into the director of the museum at Michigan State University has found him guilty of research misconduct and other behavior stemming from his meddling in efforts to repatriate a 500-year-old mummy of a young girl that came to the school from South America in the late 19th century.

A committee at the East Lansing institution determined that Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and historian misappropriated the work of other scholars, fabricated data and committed other misconduct in his handling of the mummy matter, which made headlines last year.

Although the case involves several years of misbehavior, at its core are two main events: a repatriation ceremony in Washington, D.C. for the relic, and an official letter in which Auslander, as director of the museum published the ill-gotten work.

According to a summary of the report provided to Retraction Watch which is consistent with official communications viewed by us:

Former grad student forges his supervisor’s authorship — and gets smacked down

On December 29, Jan Behrends, of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, was checking his Google Scholar profile when he saw his name on a paper — one he’d played no part in writing.

The article, “Microelectrochemical cell arrays for whole-cell currents recording through ion channel proteins based on trans-electroporation approach,” had appeared earlier that month in Analyst, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry. According to Behrends:

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