Ivan Oransky

UCLA walks back claim that application for $50 million grant included fake data

More than a month after a federal watchdog announced that a UCLA scientist had included fake data in a grant application worth more than $50 million, the university says the application didn’t have issues, after all.

In early August, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said that Janina Jiang faked data in eleven grant applications from UCLA. At the time, based on what was available in the ORI’s report, we noted:

Weekend reads: Russian co-authorship ban; predatory conferences; ‘Does peer review improve the statistical content of manuscripts?’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit
Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids
How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions
One chiropractic manipulation patient injury. Two case reports. Two editor’s notes.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 260. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million but then dropped the case, is appealing a recent court order that he pay the journal’s publisher more than $400,000 in legal fees. Those fees are based on an anti-SLAPP statute, “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

As we have previously reported, Jacobson:

Weekend reads: Fake reproductive health data alleged; ‘bad brains;’ ‘heinous’ misconduct

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Physics publisher retracting nearly 500 likely paper mill papers
Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper
Didier Raoult papers earn expressions of concern as criminal investigation gets underway
Brain tumor researchers retract paper from Science journal
Chinese hospital sanctioned at least 35 scientists for research misconduct
Publisher says it will investigate allegations despite editor’s refusal
Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts four papers

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 258. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Physics publisher retracting nearly 500 likely paper mill papers

A physics publisher is retracting 494 papers after an investigation “indicated that some papers may have been created, manipulated, and/or sold by a commercial entity” – aka a paper mill.

The vast majority – 463 articles – are from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, while 21 are from IOP Conference Series: Materials Science & Engineering, and 10 are from IOP Conference Series: Earth & Environmental Science. A bit less than a third – 142 – are appearing today.

In a statement, Kim Eggleton, Head of Peer Review and Research Integrity at IOP Publishing, tells Retraction Watch:

Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts four papers

A Johns Hopkins researcher who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology has retracted four papers from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) for concerns about images in the articles.

Gregg Semenza is “one of today’s preeminent researchers on the molecular mechanisms of oxygen regulation,” the work for which he shared the 2019 Nobel, according to Hopkins. But even before that, the pseudonymous Claire Francis began pointing out potential image duplications and other manipulations in Semenza’s work on PubPeer, as described in October 2020 by Leonid Schneider.

The four papers retracted yesterday are:

Weekend reads: A tale of deception; hydroxychloroquine in Australia; AI and ML to fix your papers — or write them

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

An editor on why he ignores anonymous whistleblowers – and why authors are free to publish ‘bullshit and fiction’
In four years, a psychosocial counselor co-authored seven papers on disparate medical topics. How?
When an independent replication isn’t really independent
Veterinary researcher banned from journal after fourth forthcoming retraction
Former NCI postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 257. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: ‘The Problem of Irreproducible Bioscience Research;’ ‘How to Stop the Unknowing Citation of Retracted Papers;’ data scandal leads to stock drop

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Exclusive: Cancer researcher sues med school for retaliation after research misconduct finding
Editors-in-chief of aging journal resign en masse after ‘impasse with the Anatomical Society and Wiley’
Penn maintains wall of silence over now-retired prof as retractions mount
How a tweet sparked an investigation that led to a PhD student leaving his program
A former PhD student loses two papers for forging her co-author’s name
Guest post: What happened when we tried to get a paper claiming ‘billions of lives are potentially at risk’ from COVID-19 vaccines retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 254. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: ‘Who Cares About Publication Integrity?’; revealing a Galileo forgery; repeat predatory journal authors

Our co-founder Ivan Oransky turns 50 today, and we know what he’d really like for his birthday: Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A tale of (3)2 retraction notices: On publishers, paper mill products, and the sleuths that find them
White House official banned from publishing in PNAS following retraction
Imagine learning you’re an author on a paper after it’s retracted for plagiarism
‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process
On second thought: journal reverses course on paper it agreed to retract last year

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

On the heels of a high-profile retraction that followed deep investigations by the Science news team, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the journal, says it’s time to improve the process of correcting the scientific record.

In an editorial published today, Thorp, a former university provost, describes the often time-consuming and frustrating process involving journals, universities, and government agencies that are often at odds, or at least have different priorities. Based on the experience of what can feel like gridlock, he calls for breaking the process into two stages:

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