Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, whose work has been cited more than 140,000 times, has had a second paper retracted because he duplicated his previous work.
In March 2017, a group of researchers in Vancouver, along with a colleague in Philadelphia, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluding that a particular antibiotic might be useful for treating conditions in people with rare mutations.
Then, this past July, while continuing the work, they had an unexpected result. That made them suspect that the antibiotic they thought they had ordered, gentamicin, wasn’t what they thought it was. With the help of a different company that sells the antibiotic, they confirmed they were studying a different compound — and retracted the paper.
In February of this year, the Joy of Cooking launched what you could call an epic Twitter stream. Inspired by Stephanie Lee’s reporting in BuzzFeed on Brian Wansink — the food marketing researcher at Cornell who later resigned following findings of misconduct by the university — the legendary cookbook pointed out all that was wrong with a 2009 study claiming that their recipes added calories over the years. Those tweets led to coverage in The Verge,The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
This week, the Annals of Internal Medicine retracted that paper, along with another. That brings Wansink’s tally of retracted papers to 17, with one of the papers retracted twice. (And no, 17 is nowhere near a record; he’s not even among the 30 authors with the most retractions in the world.) As Retraction Watch readers will likely recall, his work began to unravel when, after a 2016 blog post in which Wansink seemed to endorse p-hacking, four researchers joined forces to analyze his work.
A pair of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) has had a total of nine more papers retracted, pushing their totals to 24 and 26, respectively.
Three of the retractions appeared in RSC Advances, two appeared in Journal of Materials Chemistry B, and one each appeared in Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Biomaterials Science, and CrystEngComm.
Carlo Croce, a professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus who has faced multiple investigations into misconduct allegations, has been forced to step down from his post as department chair.
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