The journal Proteomics has retracted a paper for a plagiarized figure — but how the authors came to possess the image in the first place remains a mystery.
If you wanted to minimize the real-life effects of misconduct, you might note that some of the retractions we cover are in tiny obscure journals hardly anyone reads. But a new meta-analysis and editorial in JAMA today suggests — as a study by Grant Steen did a few years ago — that the risk of patient harm due to scientific misconduct is not just theoretical.
As the editorialists note, hydroxyethyl starches (HES) are “synthetic fluid products used commonly in clinical practice worldwide:”
Synthetic colloids received market approval in the 1960s without evaluation of their efficacy and safety in large phase 3 clinical trials. Subsequent studies reported mixed evidence on their benefits and harms.
Would you hire someone found to have faked data on federal grant applications as a “grant services consultant?”
You may have been without knowing it, if you had gone to Washington, D.C.-based Strategic Health Care for help with your grants. There, you would have found Michael Miller — page removed today, more on that in a moment — whose bio described him as an “internationally known neuroscientist.”
He has more than 30 years of experience in obtaining federal support for his research and that of collaborators. This includes individual grants (R01′s and R03′s) and fellowships for himself and pre- and post-doctoral trainees from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), merit reviews and research career awards from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and support from private foundations. In addition, Dr. Miller successfully orchestrated and competed for a $9 million NIH center (P50) grant that coordinated research at five different institutions.
The journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking is retracting a paper about Facebook.
“Bridging the Gap on Facebook: Assessing Intergroup Contact and Its Effects for Intergroup Relations,” is by Sandy Schumann of the Free University of Brussels. The notice says only:
This article has been officially retracted from the Journal.
Retraction Watch readers may recall that earlier this month, WordPress removed ten of our posts about Anil Potti — the former Duke oncology researcher who has retracted or corrected 19 papers — after a false DMCA copyright claim against us. The site which claimed the copyright violations — and which no longer exists — actually plagiarized our posts, not the other way around.
We’re still waiting for those posts to be reinstated; our understanding is that they’ll be back later this week. In the meantime, Nanopolitan, another site that wrote about Potti has been hit with what looks like a false DMCA claim.
A rising star at MIT has retracted a paper after an investigation found that her former postdoc had “falsified or fabricated figures.”
Alice Ting, winner of an NIH Directors Pioneer Award and named one of Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35,” published the paper, “Imaging Activity-Dependent Regulation of Neurexin-Neuroligin Interactions Using trans-Synaptic Enzymatic Biotinylation,” in Cell in 2010 along with Amar Thyagarajan.
Today brings two journal editorials about misconduct and retractions. They take, if we may, a bit of an optimistic and perhaps even blindered approach.