Author: Ivan Oransky

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 254.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

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

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

Holden Thorp

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:

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

White House official banned from publishing in PNAS following retraction

Jane Lubchenco

Jane Lubchenco, the deputy director for climate and environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has been banned from publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and from other NAS activities for five years.

The move, first reported by Axios, comes ten months after PNAS retracted a paper that Lubchenco had edited despite the fact that one of the authors was her brother-in-law and that she had been his PhD advisor. The paper contained an error, but PNAS editor in chief May Berenbaum told us at the time that the conflict of interest would have been enough to prompt a retraction.

In January of this year, the American Accountability Foundation, which calls itself “a charitable and educational organization that conducts non-partisan governmental oversight research and fact-checking so Americans can hold their elected leaders accountable” and has also been called a “slime machine targeting dozens of Biden nominees” by The New Yorker, asked the NAS to investigate. Thomas Jones, the AAF’s founder, wrote, in part:

Continue reading White House official banned from publishing in PNAS following retraction

A tale of (3)2 retraction notices: On publishers, paper mill products, and the sleuths that find them

Should publishers acknowledge the work of sleuths when their work has led to retractions?

We were prompted to pose the question by a recent retraction from International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics of a 2021 paper. The notice reads:

Continue reading A tale of (3)2 retraction notices: On publishers, paper mill products, and the sleuths that find them

Weekend reads: Underage sex comic study removed following outrage; postdoc claims retaliation; plagiarism in COVID-19 papers

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Underage sex comic study removed following outrage; postdoc claims retaliation; plagiarism in COVID-19 papers

Doing the right thing: Harvard researchers retract Cell paper after work contradicts finding

Corresponding author Thomas Look

The authors of a 2020 paper in Cell are earning plaudits after they retracted the study following the publication of an article last year that contradicted their earlier findings.

The paper, “Allosteric Activators of Protein Phosphatase 2A Display Broad Antitumor Activity Mediated by Dephosphorylation of MYBL2,” purported to show that a particular compound could be useful in animal studies because it did not have some of the off-target activity of other compounds. It has been cited 45 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But as the retraction notice says, a paper published last year in The EMBO Journal by Jakob Nilsson and Gianmatteo Vit of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found that wasn’t true:

Continue reading Doing the right thing: Harvard researchers retract Cell paper after work contradicts finding

Science retracts coral reef recovery paper more than a year after a report on allegations in its own pages

Danielle Dixson

Fifteen months after its news division published an investigation into work on coral reef recovery, Science has retracted a 2014 paper on the subject.

The article, “Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting corals and fishes: A tipping point that may limit reef recovery,” was written by a group at Georgia Institute of Technology led by Danielle Dixson, then a postdoc at the university. Science issued an expression of concern in February of this year, as we reported then.

According to the retraction notice, signed by Science editor in chief Holden Thorp, the University of Delaware, Lewes, where Dixson has been running her own lab, “no longer [has] confidence in the validity of the data”:

Continue reading Science retracts coral reef recovery paper more than a year after a report on allegations in its own pages

Weekend reads: Are papers retracted often enough?; ‘What makes an undercover science sleuth tick?’; journals dominate prestige rankings

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 253. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database â€” which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately â€” 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Are papers retracted often enough?; ‘What makes an undercover science sleuth tick?’; journals dominate prestige rankings

UCLA veteran researcher faked data in 11 grant applications, per Feds

UCLA

A 10-year veteran of the University of California, Los Angeles “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly and recklessly” faking data in 11 different grant applications, according to a U.S. federal watchdog.

[Please see an update on this post; UCLA now says one of the 11 grant applications did not include faked data.]

Janina Jiang, who joined UCLA’s pathology and laboratory medicine department in 2010, faked “flow cytometry data to represent interferon-γ (IFN-γ) expression in immune cells of mice administered with human recombinant vaults such that the represented data were incompatible with the raw experimental data,” the Office of Research Integrity said in its findings earlier this week.

Jiang, who appears to work at a lab at UCLA affiliate hospital Cedars Sinai, agreed to three years of supervision for any federally funded work. She has not responded to a request for comment from Retraction Watch.

Continue reading UCLA veteran researcher faked data in 11 grant applications, per Feds

Leading primate researcher admits to faking data in NIH grant applications, paperďżź

Deepak Kaushal

The director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio faked data 10 different times in federal grant applications and a now-retracted paper, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The Texas primate center has garnered some attention during the pandemic for taking part in tests of a COVID-19 vaccine and treatment unrelated to the faked data.

Deepak Kaushal, according to his bio, “oversees the SNPRC operations, a more than $40 million NIH-funded national resource for primate research” and “is principal investigator on 15 NIH-funded grants and is co-investigator of 9 other NIH grants.” He “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, and/or recklessly falsifying and fabricating the experimental methodology to demonstrate results obtained under different experimental conditions,” the ORI found.

Continue reading Leading primate researcher admits to faking data in NIH grant applications, paperďżź