A group of neonatologists in Germany has retracted a paper after apparently realizing that their data weren’t what they thought they were.
Here’s the notice, for “Low Dose Lidocaine for Refractory Seizures in Preterm Neonates,” which appeared in the Indian Journal of Pediatrics: Continue reading Seizure study retracted after authors realize data got “terribly mixed”
Last year, an audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found “a potential for unnecessary duplication” among the billions of dollars in research grants funded by national agencies. Some researchers, it seemed, could be winning more than one grant to do the same research.
Prompted by that report, Virginia Tech’s Skip Garner and his colleagues used eTBLAST, which Garner invented, to review more than 630,000 grant applications submitted to the NIH, NSF, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, “the largest charitable funder of breast cancer research in the United States.” The approach was not unlike those by publishers to identify potential article duplications.
In a Comment published today in Nature, they report that they found 1,300 applications above a “similarity score” cutoff of 0.8 for federal agencies, and 0.65 for Komen documents — “with 1 indicating identical text in two same-length documents, and more than 1 representing identical text in one piece that is longer than the other.”
When they manually reviewed those 1,300: Continue reading Has “double-dipping” cost U.S. science funding agencies tens of millions of dollars?
A new study in Clinical Chemistry paints an alarming picture of how often scientists deposit data that they’re supposed to — but perhaps not surprisingly, papers whose authors did submit such data scored higher on a quality scale than those whose authors didn’t deposit their data.
Ken Witwer, a pathobiologist at Hopkins, was concerned that a lot of studies involving microarray-based microRNA (miRNA) weren’t complying with Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) standards supposedly required by journals. So he looked at 127 such papers published between July 2011 and April 2012 in journals including PLOS ONE, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Blood, and Clinical Chemistry, assigning each one a quality score and checking whether the authors had followed guidelines.
What he uncovered wasn’t pretty — and has already led to a retraction. From the abstract: Continue reading Study finds many authors aren’t sharing data when they publish — and leads to a PLOS ONE retraction
An endocrinologist who resigned from the University of Tokyo last March as the university was investigating his work has retracted another paper.
Here’s the notice for the paper by corresponding author Shigeaki Kato and colleagues in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research: Continue reading Shigeaki Kato notches fifth retraction
Regular Retraction Watch readers may find the name Grant Steen familiar. Steen has published a number of important papers on retractions, most recently in PNAS. Recently, he approached us for help with what sounds like another project that is likely to increase our understanding of misconduct in science: Steen wants to gather the stories of those involved in fraud. We’re happy to present his explanation of the project, and his requests:
Why is there fraud in science?
Scientists believe—or at least profess to believe—that science is a process of iteratively approaching Truth. Failed experiments are supposed to serve as fodder for successful experiments, so that clouded thinking can be clarified. Observations that are fundamentally true are thought to find support, while observations that are flawed in some way are supplanted by better observations.
Why then would anyone think that scientific fraud can succeed? Continue reading Have you been involved in scientific fraud? Grant Steen wants to hear from you
A University of Wisconsin neuroscience researcher falsified “Western blot images as well as quantitative and statistical data” in two NIH-supported papers and three unfunded grant applications, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found.
As first reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and then The Scientist, Rao M. Adibhatla has agreed to retract the two papers, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Brain Research: Continue reading University of Wisconsin neuroscientist faked data in two papers: ORI
The retractions keep coming for Jesús A. Lemus. Here’s the notice for retraction seven, in Molecular Ecology: Continue reading Retraction seven appears for Jesús Lemus
An associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification, Retraction Watch has learned.
Concerns had been raised about four papers by Maya Saleh and colleagues: Continue reading McGill committee says Nature figures were “intentionally contrived and falsified”
It turns out we missed two more recent retractions from Diederik Stapel. They were nestled in the table of contents of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that contained four retractions we covered last week.
The notices, for “Method matters: Effects of explicit versus implicit social comparisons on activation, behavior, and self views” (cited 48 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge) and “From seeing to being: Subliminal social comparisons affect implicit and explicit self-evaluations” (cited 95 times), both say the same thing: Continue reading This is 40 (and 41): More retractions for Diederik Stapel
A few weeks ago, we reported on the shutdown of Science-Fraud.org, a site dedicated to highlighting problems with scientific papers, thanks to legal threats. At the same time, we noted that Rui Curi, one of the authors whose work had been questioned — and whose lawyers had sent the site a cease-and-desist letter — ended up retracting a paper the site had questioned.
Now, Curi has corrected another paper that featured on Science-Fraud.org. Here’s the notice: for “Comparative toxicity of oleic and linoleic acid on human lymphocytes,” which was originally published in Life Science in 2006: Continue reading Curi-us: Author whose lawyers threatened Science Fraud corrects a paper the site criticized