We’ve seen partial retractions, and retract-and-replacements, but here’s a first (cue timpanis): The Total Retraction.
A Brazilian journal has pulled a 2018 paper on food security for plagiarism — at least, that’s what really happened; the stated reasons are a bit sauced up.
According to the notice: Continue reading Total recall: Brazilian journal issues “total retraction” of plagiarized paper
A once-prominent bone researcher whose career crumbled after allegations of misconduct has lost her medical license in Canada.
The researcher, Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, formerly of the University of Toronto, had been considered a rising star in the international community of osteoporosis researchers, winning awards and collaborating with some of the leading senior investigators in the field.
But on March 6, 2018, Jamal was summoned by a disciplinary committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to hear the following letter: Continue reading Researcher banned from federal Canadian funding after misconduct loses medical license
A group of software engineers from academia and industry has lost a 2017 paper on web-based applications over concerns that the data were fabricated.
The article, “Facilitating debugging of web applications through recording reduction,” appeared online in May 2017 in Empirical Software Engineering, a Springer publication.
According to the retraction notice, which was released in December: Continue reading “Evidence of fabricated data” leads to retraction of paper on software engineering
The authors of a 2017 paper on how chronic inflammation might hasten aging have retracted the work because it turned out to be a collage of previously published articles.
The paper, “Chronic Inflammation: Accelerator of Biological Aging,” appeared in The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, an Oxford University Press title. It has been cited 41 times, earning it a “Highly Cited Paper” designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, meaning it has earned more citations than 99% of papers published in its field that year. The first author is Bertrand Fougère, of Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier and Tours University Hospital.
Here’s the notice (which we’ve reformatted for readability): Continue reading “We were very uncomfortable with this situation:” French group loses aging paper for “overlap”
PLOS ONE has retracted two papers for image problems, which we’ve learned were brought to the journal’s attention more than four years ago.
The first article came from a group of cancer researchers in China, and it turns out to have a bit more wrong than a few dodgy figures. The second also involved cancer research.
Asked about the delay, PLOS ONE told Retraction Watch: Continue reading “We regret our delay:” PLOS ONE retracts two papers
A pair of business researchers in Pittsburgh has lost a controversial 2017 paper on how institutional stock holdings affect tax strategies amid concerns about the validity of the data.
The article, “Governance and taxes: evidence from regression discontinuity,” which appeared in The Accounting Review, was written by Andrew Bird and Stephen Karolyi, of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.
According to the abstract: Continue reading After more than a year of back and forth, an accounting journal retracts a paper on tax avoidance
The authors of a 2013 paper on antibody production in patients with rheumatoid arthritis have retracted the work in what looks to us like a case study in how to handle operator error.
The paper, “Monoclonal IgG antibodies generated from joint-derived B cells of RA patients have a strong bias toward citrullinated autoantigen recognition,” was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine by a group from the Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden and elsewhere, and has been cited 128 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The last author, Vivianne Malmström, is a specialist in cellular immunology at the KI.
Here’s an excerpt from the lengthy notice: Continue reading Group issues model retraction over antibody error
Carlo Croce, the embattled cancer researcher at The Ohio State University (OSU), is suing the institution to reclaim the department chair he lost late last year for reasons that he says are unclear.
In a filing with the Franklin County civil court, Croce and his attorneys, from the Columbus firm of James E. Arnold and Associates, argue that the university failed to follow its own rules for demoting faculty members last year when it stripped Croce of his position of chair of the Department of Cancer Genetics and Biology. Croce had held the post for more than three consecutive four-year terms, starting in October 2004.
The nut of Croce’s claim centers on the alleged failure of K. Craig Kent, the university’s Dean of the College of Medicine, to consult with the college’s faculty members before demoting him in early November 2018 — a move Croce opposed. Continue reading OSU cancer researcher who has faced misconduct allegations sues to regain lost department chairmanship
The authors of an much-ballyhooed 2017 paper about the spread of fake news on social media have retracted their article after finding that they’d botched their analysis.
The paper, “Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information,” presented an argument for why bogus facts seem to gain so much traction on sites such as Facebook. According to the researchers — — from Shanghai Institute of Technology, Indiana University and Yahoo — the key was in the sheer volume of bad information, which swamps the brain’s ability to discern the real from the merely plausible or even the downright ridiculous, competing with limited attention spans and time.
As they reported: Continue reading Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news turns out to be…fake news
Last March, we reported on the retraction of a 2017 paper in Stem Cell Reports by Kohei Yamamizu and colleagues for widespread fabrication of figures. Turns out the problems were at least five years older than that.
Yamamizu had received a pink slip from his institution, the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), which had put the blame for the misconduct squarely on his shoulders. (The director of the institute, Nobel winner Shinya Yamanaka, also took some of the blame in a public statement in which he said he bore “a strong responsibility for not having prevented research misconduct at our institute.”)
Yamamizu has a new retraction, but this time’s a bit different. Here’s the notice for the paper, “Protein Kinase A Determines Timing of Early Differentiation through Epigenetic Regulation with G9,” which appeared in Cell Stem Cell in June 2012 (Yamanaka was not a co-author on either study). Although the statement acknowledges the internal investigation, it doesn’t mention misconduct or name Yamamizu: Continue reading Japanese stem cell fraud leads to a new retraction