Damage from the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, via Wikimedia
A researcher in Japan who published at least five papers about a deadly 2016 earthquake faked some of the data, Osaka University announced late last week.
Publishers love their embargoes, whether they’re of papers that aren’t open access yet, or are available to the media before they’re published. Apparently, however, they also break embargoes, just like the journalists they sometimes sanction for the same sin.
Take Oxford University Press, which publishes the journal Physical Therapy for the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). Late last month, the journal temporarily withdrew eight papers because, well, the publisher broke the journal’s embargo. Jan Reynolds, the APTA’s managing editor for the journal and director of scientific communications, explained to Retraction Watch thatContinue reading Journal temporarily withdraws eight papers after publisher mistake
Wouldn’t it be terrific if manuscripts and published papers could be checked automatically for errors? That was the premise behind an algorithmic approach we wrote about last week, and today we bring you a Q&A with Jennifer Byrne, the last author of a new paper in PLOS ONE that describes another approach, this one designed to find incorrect nucleotide sequence reagents. Byrne, a scientist at the University of Sydney, has worked with the first author of the paper, Cyril Labbé, and has become a literature watchdog. Their efforts have already led to retractions. She answered several questions about the new paper.
When Venkata Sudheer Kumar Ramadugu, then a postdoc at the University of Michigan, admitted to the university on June 28 of last year that he had committed research misconduct in a paper that appeared in Chemical Communications in 2017, he also “attested that he did not manipulate any data in his other four co-authored publications published while at the University of Michigan.”
And so, a few days later, Michael J. Imperiale, the university’s research integrity officer, wrote a letter to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) informing them of the findings. On August 2, Ramadagu was terminated from Michigan. And on August 3, Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, the head of the lab where Ramadagu had worked, wrote a letter to Chemical Communications requesting retraction of the paper.
It’s become a sort of Retraction Watch Mad Libs: Author writes a paper that is so far, far, out of the mainstream. Maybe it argues that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Or that vaccines cause autism. Truth squads swarm over the paper, taking to blogs and Twitter to wonder, in the exasperated tone of those who have been here before, how on earth it was published in a peer reviewed journal.
Then, in something that approaches — but does not quite qualify as — contrition, the journal in question retracts the paper, mumbling something in a retraction notice about a compromised peer review process, or that ghosts in the machine allowed the paper to be published instead of being rejected.
This week’s parade float entry is a paper in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, a Springer Nature title that is apparently sponsored by The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where many of its editorial board members work.
Retraction Watch readers may have heard about Fr. Thomas Rosica, a priest who recently apologized for plagiarism and resigned from the board of a college. The case, which involved Rosica’s speeches and popular columns, prompted at least two observers to take a look at his scholarly work.