In 2018, a newly minted PhD made an uncomfortable discovery.
At a conference, he saw other researchers presenting the results of their attempt to replicate the work of one of his fellow students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who had found a relationship between heavy rainfall and the number of prisoners in Nigeria in the first half of the 20th century.
But they couldn’t replicate the findings.
Continue reading Dutch university can revoke PhD for fake data, court rules
The chair of the Department of Pulmonary Immunology at the University of Texas at Tyler Health Science Center lost a paper last year after an institutional investigation found several issues with the data in the article.
Although the researcher, Ramakrishna Vankayalapati, is still identified as the chair on his online profile and the department’s website, he no longer holds that position, Retraction Watch has learned.
The paper, “Ornithine-A urea cycle metabolite enhances autophagy and controls Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection,” was published in Nature Communications in July 2020. It has been cited 21 times, according to the journal’s statistics.
Continue reading Texas dept. chair no longer in position amid university investigation and retraction
An investigation at McMaster University found that Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist by training who has had 15 papers retracted in the last three years, “engaged in fabrication and falsification” including duplicating data, according to summarized findings sent to coauthors.
Kate Laskowski, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, shared on Twitter the summary McMaster had sent her about three papers she had coauthored with Pruitt.
Continue reading Spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt faked data in multiple papers, university finds
A new report from a UK Parliament committee calls for scientific publishers to correct and retract papers much quicker than they currently do, for the sake of research integrity and reproducibility.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee of the House of Commons issued its report today, following an inquiry to which Retraction Watch and one of our cofounders, Ivan Oransky, provided evidence. Many others also gave evidence, including sleuth Dorothy Bishop.
The report is an extensive look at current issues of reproducibility and research integrity, and includes many recommendations. About the role of scientific publishers, the report says:
Continue reading Retractions should not take longer than two months, says UK Parliament committee
A 2021 article that found journals from the open-access publisher MDPI had characteristics of predatory journals has been retracted and replaced with a version that softens its conclusions about the company. MDPI is still not satisfied, however.
The article, “Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI),” was published in Research Evaluation. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, a professor of business administration and marketing at the University of Seville in Spain, and the paper’s sole author, analyzed 53 MDPI journals that were included in Clarivate’s 2018 Journal Citation Reports.
Continue reading Article that assessed MDPI journals as “predatory” retracted and replaced
The former director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio has been removed from the post after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found he had faked data.
Last August, ORI found that Deepak Kaushal, who remains a professor at Texas Biomed, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, and/or recklessly falsifying and fabricating the experimental methodology to demonstrate results obtained under different experimental conditions.”
Citing Kaushal’s admission, ORI said that he had engaged in research misconduct in work supported by 8 grants from the National Institutes of Health, and faked data in two grant applications and one published paper that has since been retracted.
Continue reading Leading primate researcher demoted after admitting he faked data
Hindawi will cease publishing four journals that it identified as “heavily compromised by paper mills.”
The open access publisher announced today in a blog post that it will continue to retract articles from the closed titles, which are Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, the Journal of Healthcare Engineering, and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.
The closures follow reporting by Retraction Watch in February that a professor used the identity and email account of a former student to edit special issues of two of the journals, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.
Continue reading Hindawi shuttering four journals overrun by paper mills
The former director of a cancer research center faked data and presented others’ published data and text as his own in four grant applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and one research record, according to a U.S. government watchdog.
Johnny J. He, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (RFUMS) in Chicago, Ill., “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying, fabricating, and plagiarizing experimental data and text” published by other scientists, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said today.
He did not immediately respond to an email or phone call seeking comment.
Continue reading Former cancer research center director plagiarized and faked data, feds say
Last week, we brought you the story of a professor who found her name on an article she didn’t write, which also seemed to have been plagiarized.
Since our story was published, we’ve learned a little more about the journal that published the article, the African Journal of Political Science.
Jephias Mapuva, a professor at the Bindura University of Science Education in Zimbabwe, who is listed as the editor in chief of the journal, told us in an email that he is “not associated with the journal in any way.”
“It came to me as a surprise that I am listed as an Editor-In-Chief,” he wrote. He also copied an email address for the journal publisher, International Scholars Journal, and asked for his name to be removed from the website:
Continue reading ‘Frankly abusive’: More questions about the journal that stole an author’s identity
Last August, a U.S. federal research misconduct watchdog announced findings that a longtime researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles named Janina Jiang faked data in 11 grant applications.
More than a month later, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued a rare correction to its announcement, saying “additional information” from UCLA indicated that one of the grants “did not fund or contain falsified/fabricated data.” The watchdog agency said it would remove the application in question from its findings of research misconduct.
The grant, UL1 TR000124, helped fund the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) with $57 million from 2012-2015. The listed principal investigator, Steven M. Dubinett, is the interim dean for UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
At the time of the correction, we wondered how a report that would have had to be reviewed by multiple officials – and lawyers – at both institutions could include such a mistake, and filed public records requests to find out.
Continue reading A response to a public records request that raised more questions than it answered