We have obtained a copy of the report that led to the investigation of Jens Förster, the social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, which is calling for the retraction of a 2012 article by the researcher for manipulated data.
As we reported earlier, Förster has denied any wrongdoing in the matter.
Continue reading Anatomy of an inquiry: The report that led to the Jens Förster investigation
Retraction Watch has obtained an email from Jens Förster, the social psychologist in the Netherlands who, as Dutch media reported this week, was the target of a misconduct investigation at the University of Amsterdam. The inquiry led to the call for the retraction of a paper by Förster and a colleague, Markus Denzler, over concerns of data manipulation.
Förster denies those claims and said Denzler was not involved in the heavy lifting for the study in question: Continue reading Social psychologist Förster denies misconduct, calls charge “terrible misjudgment”
In February we reported on the case of Fred Walumbwa, a leadership scholar at Florida International University who was poised to lose five papers in the Leadership Quarterly for reasons not entirely clear but which appeared to involve problems with the data.
Now we see a sixth retraction for Walumbwa, this one in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. The article, titled (ironically enough), “Authentically leading groups: The mediating role of collective psychological capital and trust,” had appeared in September 2009. Per the abstract:
Continue reading Florida leadership researcher Walumbwa notches sixth retraction
The University of Amsterdam has called for the retraction of a 2011 paper by two psychology researchers after a school investigation concluded that the article contained bogus data, the Dutch press are reporting.
The paper, “Sense Creative! The Impact of Global and Local Vision, Hearing, Touching, Tasting and Smelling on Creative and Analytic Thought,” was written by Jens Förster and Markus Denzler and published in Social Psychological & Personality Science. It purported to find that:
Continue reading New Dutch psychology scandal? Inquiry cites data manipulation, calls for retraction
Blood has an interesting retraction of a 2011 paper on what a group of authors claimed was a new cell line — but which proved, apparently, to be a chimera.
The article, “Oxygen-regulated expression of the erythropoietin gene in the human renal cell line REPC,” came from a team at Universität Duisburg-Essen, in Germany, and has been cited 21 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the abstract: Continue reading Contaminated cells force retraction of Blood paper
A group of authors in China has retracted their December 2013 paper in PLoS ONE after realizing that they’d been studying the wrong cells.
The paper, “Up-Regulation of pVHL along with Down-Regulation of HIF-1α by NDRG2 Expression Attenuates Proliferation and Invasion in Renal Cancer Cells,” came from Lei Gao, of the Fourth Military Medical University, in Xi’an, and colleagues. It purported to find that:
Continue reading Wrong cell line leads to retraction of kidney cancer study
Back in December, the University of Kansas issued a public censure of a former water researcher who, the school says, engaged in a pattern of plagiarism and other shoddy publishing practices.
Marios Sophocleous, who’d held the position of senior scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey:
Continue reading Retractions appear in case of former Kansas water scientist rebuked for misconduct
A group of researchers in Tokyo has lost their 2013 article in the Journal of Crystal Growth over commercial interests — which don’t appear to be their own.
We’ll explain.
The article, “Interactions between planar defects in bulk 3C-SiC,” came from a team consisting of a researcher at Keio University and scientists at two companies, HOYA Corporation, an optics firm, and SICOXS Corporation, which makes semiconductor wafers.
According to the abstract: Continue reading Crystal unclear? “Business decision” forces retraction of silicon paper
Last month, researchers published a paper whose conclusions suggested that looking at Arctic sea ice in the autumn offers clues to winter temperatures in Europe.
The letter appeared — briefly, as this post will demonstrate — in Nature Geoscience. The letter, titled “High predictability of the winter Euro–Atlantic climate from cryospheric variability,” was written by Javier Garcia-Serrano and Claude Frankignoul, of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. The journal published the letter on March 23 and retracted it on April 14.
Here’s the abstract, which can still be found online:
Continue reading Faulty model forces rapid retraction of paper on sea ice and climate change
A group of authors in South Korea has lost their 2012 paper in Clinical Cardiology because, well, they weren’t a group after all.
The paper, “Correlation of Electrocardiographic Changes and Myocardial Fibrosis in Patients With Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Detected by Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” came from corresponding author Hyun Suk Yang, of Konkuk University School of Medicine in Seoul, and a half-dozen colleagues. At least, that’s what the manuscript said.
But according to the retraction notice, Yang had nothing to do with the paper — nor did five other co-authors. Continue reading Heart study retracted because it was submitted without permission of most of the authors