Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch:
Do you know of any instances of meta-plagiarism, i.e. a paper plagiarizing a second paper, which plagiarized a third paper? Or even longer chains of this? I know one instance of meta-plagiarism, but there should be a few others out there, I guess.
We’ve seen one such daisy chain. No poll this time, but Continue reading Ask Retraction Watch: Ever seen a case of “meta-plagiarism?”
Last week, we reported on a retraction in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry that left us a bit puzzled. The notice referred to a problem with “the way the data was presented,” but the authors told us this was just an error picked up in proofreading, somehow after the paper had been published online.
We now have much more of the story. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s May Copsey, who edits the journal, tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading Royal Society of Chemistry apologizes for unclear retraction notice
The first retraction has appeared for Alfred Fusco, a leading cancer researcher in Italy under criminal investigation for fraud.
Here’s the notice from the Journal of Clinical Investigation: Continue reading Retraction appears for Italian cancer specialist facing criminal investigation
Has anyone seen our irony meter?
The author of a 2003 study on “the ethics of being first” is retracting it because it turns out he had already published it elsewhere — making it, well, not first.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Surgical Research and the Ethics of Being First,” the Journal of Value Inquiry paper: Continue reading Who’s on first? Paper on “the ethics of being first” retracted because it was…second
The Retraction Watch archives are full of dubious distinctions — most retractions by a single researcher, longest time between publication and retraction, etc. — but now we have a competition for another: “The three most plagiarized papers.”
That new category comes to us courtesy of a retraction notice in The Scientific World Journal, “Recent Advances in DENV Receptors,” by a group of researchers in China. Here’s the new notice: Continue reading And the award for the “three most plagiarized papers” goes to…
Last month, we reported on the case of Nitin Aggarwal, who earned his PhD at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and who, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), faked data in his graduate thesis, in applications for National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association grant, and in two published papers.
Given the findings about his PhD thesis — and the fact that he had won a $1,000 award for his dissertation — we were curious whether he would lose his degree. Ravi Misra, dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Graduate School of Biomedical Science, tells Retraction Watch he won’t: Continue reading Scientist who faked data in his thesis will keep his PhD
A retraction in a chemistry journal has us scratching our heads. And we’re apparently not alone — the authors are scratching theirs, too.
Here’s the notice for “Achievement of 1.4 ng detection limit of cesium with TXRF spectrometer by changing the X-ray detector and reducing noise:” Continue reading Chemistry article retracted “due to the way data was presented”
We’ve been reporting on retractions of research published by Cardiff University scientists following an investigation into their work. On Monday, we noted a new retraction of work by the group in Cancer Research, which we thought was the second retraction following one in the Journal of Immunology in 2011. But it turns out there was another retraction published at the same time in the same journal, which we now know about thanks to commenter David Hardman and PubPeer.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading A third retraction stemming from Cardiff investigations
Last year, two psychology researchers set out to figure out whether the statistical results psychologists were reporting in the literature were distributed the way you’d expect. We’ll let the authors, E.J. Masicampo, of Wake Forest, and Daniel Lalande, of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, explain why they did that:
The psychology literature is meant to comprise scientific observations that further people’s understanding of the human mind and human behaviour. However, due to strong incentives to publish, the main focus of psychological scientists may often shift from practising rigorous and informative science to meeting standards for publication. One such standard is obtaining statistically significant results. In line with null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), for an effect to be considered statistically significant, its corresponding p value must be less than .05.
When Masicampo and Lalande looked at a year’s worth of three highly cited psychology journals — the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Psychological Science — from 2007 to 2008, they found: Continue reading “Just significant” results have been around for decades in psychology — but have gotten worse: study
Yesterday, we reported on the second retraction in a case at Cardiff University, which had found misconduct by a former scientist. Cancer Research, which published the retraction, said that scientist, Rossen Donev, could not be reached.
Donev responded to our request for comment this morning: Continue reading Former Cardiff researcher found guilty of misconduct “very disappointed,” calls process “unprofessional”