Frederik Joelving

Ex-cops tangle with journals over strip clubs and sex crimes

A study by two economists who found opening strip clubs or escort services caused sex crimes in the neighborhood to drop contains “fatal errors” and should be retracted, argues a group of past and current law enforcement officers, including three academics.

“None of us are prudes or even anti-strip club,” Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore police officer, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter). “But if you claim strip clubs reduce sex crimes – and by 13 percent! – you’re delving into serious policy issues.”

He added: “This is very typical of academics getting out of their field. They have second-hand data. They crunch the numbers … They don’t know what the data mean.”

Exclusive: World-renowned biologist accused of bullying student, stealing his work

One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.

The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.

The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists.

In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.

Colombia drug regulator halts clinical research at US-funded facility

Following an inspection earlier this month, Colombia’s FDA has suspended all human research at a facility that until this summer had been receiving U.S. funding to develop a malaria vaccine.

The Malaria Vaccine and Development Center, in the city of Cali in western Colombia, is part of the Caucaseco Scientific Research Consortium, which is run by husband-and-wife team Myriam Arévalo-Herrera and Sócrates Herrera. The couple has secured more than $17 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2003.

As we reported in April, an investigation by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exposed a host of serious problems at the facilities, including widespread animal abuse and falsified research approvals. The NIH defunded the facilities in June, as first reported by STAT.

According to a statement released on August 5 (in Spanish), the Colombian National Institute of Drug and Food Surveillance (Invima) made the following findings during its inspection of the Malaria Vaccine and Development Center:

Florida university fires criminology professor blemished by retractions

Florida State University last week terminated a criminology professor accused of research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned, capping a years-long, highly publicized saga the school says has caused almost “catastrophic” damage to its standing.

In a termination letter obtained by Retraction Watch, the university accused the former professor, Eric A. Stewart, of “extreme negligence and incompetence.” It also asserted that, due to Stewart’s actions, “decades of research” once believed “to be at the forefront of” criminology has “been shown to contain numerous erroneous and false narratives.”

“The details of problematic data management, false results, and the numerous publication retractions have negatively affected the discipline on a national level,” FSU Provost James J. Clark wrote in the letter, dated July 13.

Clark added that the debacle had also affected recruitment of faculty and students and caused the university’s researchers to worry about their chances of getting papers into top journals.

Publisher blacklists authors after preprint cites made-up studies

Last month, a millipede expert in Denmark received an email notifying him that one of his publications had been mentioned in a new manuscript on Preprints.org. But when the researcher, Henrik Enghoff, downloaded the paper, he learned that it cited his work for something off-topic.

Stranger still, the authors of the now-withdrawn preprint, a group of researchers in China and Africa, also referenced two papers by Enghoff that he knew he hadn’t written. It turned out they didn’t exist.

“I’ve never had anything like this happen before,” Enghoff, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, told Retraction Watch.

Plagiarism scandal engulfs high-profile academic in Latvia

Two years after it was quietly retracted “due to plagiarism,” a paper by a prominent researcher in Latvia has set the country’s media ablaze, drawing comments from, among others, the minister of education and science and the rector of a leading university.

The plagiarized paper came to public attention in March when the Latvian magazine Ir published serious allegations against Maris Klavins, a professor and former dean at the University of Latvia. The allegations concern “possible fraud” in an EU-funded project headed by Klavins and include not only plagiarism but data falsification, budget irregularities and suspicious cash payments.

According to Ir, the Latvian police have opened a criminal investigation into the case. Klavins told the magazine he has not been charged in the matter.

In an email to Retraction Watch, Klavins called the allegations “lies” and said the “person responsible” for “my defamation and persecution” was his former PhD student Dmitrijs Porsnovs.

Plague of anomalies in conference proceedings hint at ‘systemic issues’

Hundreds of conference papers published by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) show signs of plagiarism, citation fraud and other types of scientific misconduct, according to data sleuths.

“I am concerned that the issue with these particular conferences is widespread enough such that it indicates systemic issues with their peer review systems,” Kendra Albert wrote last August in an email to IEEE that Retraction Watch has seen.

Albert is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School and a lecturer in women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. On the side, Albert has been working with Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, to ferret out research misconduct using a computer system called the Problematic Paper Screener.

Did a ‘nasty’ publishing scheme help an Indian dental school win high rankings?

Each year, the 500 undergraduates at Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, participate in 4-hour exams that require them to write a 1500-word manuscript on research they have conducted. After faculty and students review and revise the papers, they use an online tool to add references to previously published work. Many of the papers are then submitted to and published by journals; the process contributed to the more than 1400 scholarly works the dental school published last year.

Saveetha, which calls itself a “pioneer in undergraduate publications,” says the exercise is designed to help every student gain practical research experience—as well as at least 10 publications listed in Scopus, the vast literature database maintained by the publisher Elsevier. The college’s website boasts that one Saveetha student published 24 papers.

But the torrent of undergraduate manuscripts—on topics including fruit intake by students and awareness of mental health among teenagers—also appears to serve a less savory purpose, an investigation by Retraction Watch has found. By systematically citing other papers published by Saveetha faculty—including papers on completely unrelated topics—the undergraduate publications have helped dramatically inflate the number of citations, a key measure of academic merit, linked to Saveetha.

Read the rest of this Science-Retraction Watch story here.

Journal pulls paper from Ethiopia for unlicensed use of questionnaire

A public-health journal has retracted a study from Ethiopia that made unlicensed use of a questionnaire developed by a U.S. researcher known to aggressively protect his intellectual property.

This time, he didn’t have to: The journal’s publisher flagged the copyright infringement itself, Renee Hoch, managing editor at PLOS Publication Ethics, told Retraction Watch:

Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

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