Ellie Kincaid

Anthropology groups cancel conference panel on why biological sex is “necessary” for research

Two anthropology organizations co-hosting a conference this fall have removed from the program a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.”

The panel had been slated for the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), to be held in Toronto in November.

In a letter informing the panelists of the decision, Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller, presidents of the AAA and CASCA, respectively, wrote that the executive boards of the two groups had reviewed the submission “at the request of numerous members” and decided to remove it from the conference program. They wrote:

Yale professor’s book ‘systematically misrepresents’ sources, review claims

The first book of a Yale professor of Chinese history contains a “multitude of problems,” according to a no-holds-barred review published last month.

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State appeared last August from Harvard University Press. Its author, Maura Dykstra, is now an assistant professor of history at Yale.

In an extensive review that appeared in the Journal of Chinese History on August 31, George Qiao, an assistant professor of history and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College in Massachusetts, wrote that Dykstra’s book “fails to meet basic academic standards” and is “filled with misinformation.”

The book’s problems, according to Qiao, include typos, as well as:

Turmoil at Sage journal as retractions mount

In the midst of a tumultuous year, the journal Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, a Sage title, is retracting 21 papers after an investigation identified signs of “compromised” peer review.

Clarivate delisted the journal from its Web of Science index in March for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Founding editor Biren Prasad, who managed the journal since 1992, also retired earlier this year, and the publisher took over management of peer review.

The journal’s online presence also needs attention: Neither of the associate editors listed on its website have been involved for many years, both told Retraction Watch – and one has threatened to sue the journal if she isn’t removed.

Frontiers retracts nearly 40 papers linked to ‘authorship-for-sale’

The publisher Frontiers has retracted nearly 40 papers across multiple journals linked to “the unethical practice of buying or selling authorship on research papers,” according to a press release posted to a company website Monday.

The release also states Frontiers is adopting new policies to prevent the sale of authorships on papers it publishes.

The publisher’s old policy simply stated that “Requests to modify the author list after submission should be made to the editorial office using the authorship change form.”

Now, such requests “will only be granted under exceptional circumstances and after in-depth assessment by the Frontiers’ research integrity unit,” according to the release. The publisher will also keep track of the requests “to identify suspicious patterns and trends.”

Weill Cornell cancer researchers committed research misconduct, feds say

Two cancer researchers who formerly worked at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City published 12 papers with fake data that amounts to research misconduct, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

ORI found that Andrew Dannenberg “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly reporting falsified and/or fabricated data” in the papers, and Kotha Subbaramaiah “reused Western blot images from the same source and falsely relabeled them to represent different proteins and/or experimental results.”

The published findings for both scientists include the same extensive list of duplicated images in a dozen papers, all retracted.

Former Stanford president retracts 1999 Cell paper

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned following scrutiny of his published papers and an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a third paper, this one from Cell.

Last week, Tessier-Lavigne retracted two articles from Science that had been published in 2001.

The Cell paper, A Ligand-Gated Association between Cytoplasmic Domains of UNC5 and DCC Family Receptors Converts Netrin-Induced Growth Cone Attraction to Repulsion, was published in 1999. It has been cited 577 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice was posted Monday. It states:

Stanford president retracts two Science papers following investigation

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whose resignation as president of Stanford University becomes effective today, is retracting two papers from Science following an institutional investigation that found data manipulation in multiple figures.

Both articles, “Hierarchical Organization of Guidance Receptors: Silencing of Netrin Attraction by Slit Through a Robo/DCC Receptor Complex,” and “Binding of DCC by Netrin-1 to Mediate Axon Guidance Independent of Adenosine A2B Receptor Activation,” were published in 2001, when Tessier-Lavigne, the corresponding author, was at the University of California, San Francisco. They have been cited well over 600 times in total, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Anonymous users on PubPeer posted concerns about potentially manipulated images in the papers as early as 2015. Reporting by The Stanford Daily in November 2022 spurred the university to launch an investigation into several of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers, how he responded when others identified issues in his articles, and the culture of his lab.

The university published the final report last month, finding that four of the five papers it reviewed on which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author contained “apparent manipulation of research data by others.” Tessier-Lavigne, the investigation committee concluded:

Paper that found ‘climate crisis’ to be ‘not evident yet’ retracted after re-review

An article published last January in a physics journal attracted attention for its conclusion that–contrary to mainstream climate science–extreme weather events have not become more intense or more frequent as the temperature of the earth’s surface has increased.

Now, the journal’s editors have retracted the article after a post-publication review found “that the conclusions of the article were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors.”

In the abstract of “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming,” published in The European Physical Journal Plus, the authors wrote:

Exclusive: UCSF and VA found “pervasive” manipulation in lab of former center director

Two institutional investigations that concluded in 2016 and 2019 found scientific misconduct in multiple publications from the lab of a leading urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Retraction Watch has learned.

The investigations could not determine who had manipulated the published images of experimental data, but the 2019 report concluded that Rajvir Dahiya, also director of the urology research center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “was senior/last author on all these publications and therefore responsible for the results.” Dahiya retired in 2020.

The two investigation reports, which we obtained through a public records request, along with the reports from the preliminary inquiries preceding the investigations, recommend notifying the journals that published eight papers of the issues identified. Four have so far been retracted, one corrected, and two marked with expressions of concern. One of those expressions of concern was published last month.

In comments to Retraction Watch, Dahiya blamed the findings that research misconduct occurred in his lab on the age of the papers. He said the VA destroyed notebooks with original data that had been stored in a central facility after the required data retention period had lapsed:

Lawyers can foreclose on cancer researcher’s house for unpaid defamation suit bills, says judge

A law firm that holds a mortgage on the house of Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, may foreclose on the property, a judge has ruled.

Croce hired James E. Arnold and Associates to represent him in a libel case against the New York Times and a defamation case against David Sanders, a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University who became something of a public nemesis for the Ohio scientist after pointing out problems in Croce’s published work. Croce also needed representation for Ohio State’s research misconduct investigation, and a suit attempting to stop the university from removing him as chair of the department of cancer biology and genetics.

Croce lost each case. Ohio State’s investigation found problems with how he managed his lab that did not amount to research misconduct.

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