Following an investigation, a genetics journal has pulled six cancer papers published this year for plagiarizing from other sources.
According to an excerpt from the retraction notice in Genetics and Molecular Research, the journal has “strong reason to believe that the peer review process was [a] failure,” and has alerted the authors’ institutions.
A physicist working for the Indian government has notched two retractions after being accused of multiple acts of self-plagiarism by his colleagues.
One retraction notice in Applied Surface Science says a duplicate of the paper was previously published by the same author — N. K. Sahoo, a researcher at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), which is part of the Indian government’s Department of Atomic Energy in Trombay, Mumbai. The other notice, which appears in Optical Materials, notes that the study “for the most part” has appeared in another paper by Sahoo.
Researchers have retracted a paper from a plant journal after a probe found problems with several figures.
According to the new retraction notice in The Plant Cell, some figures in the paper were manipulated, as well as “inappropriately duplicated and reused from a previous publication.” The authors assert that they believe the conclusions remain valid.
The journal has also issued two corrections that include some of the same authors — including one that cites inappropriate image manipulation.
Journals published by Wiley are retracting four papers by Yoshitaka Fujii, the anesthesiology researcher with the most retracted scientific papers.
Retraction Watch readers will be familiar with Fujii’s case: He currently holds the number one spot on our leaderboard with more than 180 retractions, some of which are pending. (That’s nearly twice the number of retractions by the researcher in the #2 spot, Joachim Boldt.)
Earlier this year,The Breast Journal and The Laryngoscope — both of which are published by Wiley-Blackwell — issued expressions of concern (EOCs) for a total of four papers by Fujii. All four papers were included in a 2012 analysis of 168 of Fujii’s studies by J. B. Carlisle, a consultant anesthetist in the UK, who concluded that the chance of much of Fujii’s data appearing the way it does naturally is
…the chance of selecting one particular atom from all the human bodies on earth.
A scientist in Germany has lost two papers that were collectively cited more than 500 times, after an investigation at her former university found her guilty of scientific misconduct.
The probe into Tina Wenz by the University of Cologne in Germany, her former employer, recommended that six of her papers — which have induced some chatter on PubPeer — should be retracted. One of these papers was pulled by Cell Metabolism last year. Now, Cell Metabolism has pulled another of Wenz’s papers, and she has also lost another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which was previously corrected.
A researcher who received a lifetime funding ban for misconduct from a Canadian agency has logged her third retraction, after a re-analysis of her work unveiled “serious inconsistencies.”
In July, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) released a report about Sophie Jamal, following an investigation by her former employer, The Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, Canada. The probe concluded that Jamal had manipulated data, which resulted in her being banned from CIHR funding for life, and the retraction of a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
After that retraction, researchers that made up the the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study Group (CaMos) decided to take a second look at Jamal’s work. In August, we reported on a retraction that came out of that examination, in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (AJKD). At the time, a senior researcher from the group told us the group had also requested another journal retract a CaMos paper.
The first author of a 2016 paper has retracted it after realizing that all the lung cancer patients that were supposed to have been untreated did, in fact, have surgery to remove their tumors.
Zhao Kai, the study’s first author from the Qilu Hospital of Shandong University and Zibo Central Hospital (both in China), took full responsibility for the error.
Science has retracted a high-profile immunology paper after a probe concluded the corresponding author had committed misconduct.
The paper — which initially caught media attention for suggesting a protein could help boost the immune system’s ability to fight off tumors — has been under a cloud of suspicion since last year, when the journal tagged it with an expression of concern, citing a university investigation.
That investigation — at Imperial College London — has concluded that the paper contained problematic figures that were the result of research misconduct. All were prepared by last and corresponding author Philip Ashton-Rickardt, who took full responsibility. Even though the paper was published in 2015, some original blots and accompanying details have disappeared.
A journal has retracted a paper after a reader pointed out some of the data looked familiar — and the authors never responded to the allegations.
According to the retraction notice in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine, the reader showed the journal that the histological data in two of the figures were from another published paper by different researchers. But when the journal contacted the authors on several occasions, they didn’t hear back.
An economics journal has corrected a paper for the second time for failing to cite previous studies — and said in a separate note that it no longer plans to publish similar errata, with rare exceptions.
In September 2015, we reported on the first erratum for “Incentives for Creativity” — a paper that analyzed ways of inspiring creativity in the workplace — after it failed to cite relevant papers. One year on, the same paper has another erratum for a similar reason: not citing relevant papers from another field.
Following an investigation, a genetics journal has pulled six cancer papers published this year for plagiarizing from other sources. 
