On Sept. 17, 2019, virologist David Sanders — who recently won a lawsuit brought against him for efforts as a scientific sleuth — wrote a letter to the Journal of Cellular Physiology about a 2004 paper whose images raised his eyebrows.
The response a day later from an editorial assistant was a hint of what was to come:
Continue reading A journal publishes a critical letter — then says it was a mistake
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: Hamsters, cats, dogs, and other fake authors; a fraudster regains her medical license; how to ruin journal titles
The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper.
The preprint, “Hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin: a potential interest in reducing in-hospital morbidity due to COVID-19 pneumonia (HI-ZY-COVID)?” was posted to medRxiv on May 11 by authors at Hopital Raymond Poincare, and sometime yesterday replaced with this statement:
Continue reading French hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study withdrawn
The associate vice president for research at Georgia State University and founding director of the university’s Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine has had his tenth paper retracted.
Like the nine previous retractions for Ming-Hui Zou, the work underlying the newly retracted paper in PLOS ONE was performed while Zou was at Oklahoma State University.
The extensive retraction notice for “Activation of the AMP-Activated Protein Kinase (AMPK) by Nitrated Lipids in Endothelial Cells” refers to problems in six of the paper’s figures, including unexpected similarities and likely splicing. It concludes:
Continue reading Associate VP for research at Georgia State is up to 10 retractions
Readers, meet Beatriz Ychussie. Or don’t meet Beatriz Ychussie.
Ychussie is a co-author of three recently retracted math papers. Or maybe not.
The three articles — in the Journal of Inequalities and Applications, Advances in Difference Equations, and Fixed Point Theory and Applications, all Springer Nature titles — had an overlapping set of problems, including plagiarism and faked peer review. But they all had one particular problem when it came to Ychussie:
Continue reading Another whodunit: The author no one can findBefore we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: Revelations about a controversial COVID-19 study; weaponizing uncertainty; a ‘super-spotter’ of duplicated images
A Springer Nature journal has retracted four papers by a group of materials scientists in France, Spain and Tunisia, and slapped expressions of concern on four more.
All eight papers, from Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics, share three common authors: Abdelmajid Lassoued, Salah Ammar, and Abdellatif Gadri, of Université de Gabès in Tunisia. The retractions and expressions of concern all relate to duplicate publication of other work by papers that include various members of the team as authors.
A typical retraction notice, for “Synthesis and characterization of Ni-doped α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles through co-precipitation method with enhanced photocatalytic activities”:
Continue reading Materials science group loses four papers, has four more flaggedA journal has retracted a 2015 paper because it apparently plagiarized a manuscript submitted two years earlier — but we’re scratching our heads about how it all happened.
The paper, “Chattering-free variable structure controller design via fractional calculus approach and its application,” was published in Nonlinear Dynamics and has been cited 15 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Here’s the notice:
Continue reading A whodunit: Journal retracts paper that copied from an unpublished manuscript
Carlo Croce can’t catch a break in court.
Yesterday, a Federal U.S. judge ruled against Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, in a case Croce had filed against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017. As Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, writes in the 36-page ruling — which we’d recommend reading in its entirety:
Continue reading Cancer researcher loses defamation suit against criticBefore we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: A COVID-19 conspiracy theory; a 15-year-old publishes in NEJM; the need for speed