Author: Shannon Palus

Reporter fired by WIRED had been dismissed by newspaper for missing deadlines

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 5.21.28 PMWe have learned that Nic Cavell, who was dismissed last week from WIRED for plagiarizing in several stories for the publication’s website, was fired from another publication for missing deadlines.

Before Cavell was selected to be a 2016 reporting fellow at WIRED magazine — a paid six-month position for promising young reporters — he wrote on the crime beat for The Riverdale Press, a Bronx paper. His 20 bylines span February 2015 to June 2015. We have learned from a source who wished to remain anonymous that he was let go after he had trouble handing in those stories on time.

Riverdale Press editor Shant Shahrigian, who declined to comment on the reasons for Cavell’s departure, told us that he had not encountered plagiarism in the reporter’s work: Continue reading Reporter fired by WIRED had been dismissed by newspaper for missing deadlines

Methodology of paper linking vaccine to behavioral issues “seriously flawed,” says retraction

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After temporarily removing a paper that suggested a link between the vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV) and behavioral issues, the journal has now retracted it.

Vaccine says the reason is “serious concerns regarding the scientific soundness of the article,” including flawed methodology and unjustified claims.

Christopher A. Shaw, a co-author on the paper and a researcher at the University of British Columbia, told us he has seen the notice, but doesn’t know the specific issues the journal had with the paper:

We still don’t know why [Editor in Chief] Dr Poland removed the article.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Behavioral abnormalities in young female mice following administration of aluminum adjuvants and the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil:”

Continue reading Methodology of paper linking vaccine to behavioral issues “seriously flawed,” says retraction

Doctor suspended in UK after faking co-authors, data

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 11.04.56 AMA doctor in Manchester, UK has received a year’s suspension by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service.

Gemina Doolub admitted that she fabricated research data and submitted papers without the knowledge of her co-authors, including faking an email address for a co-author, a news story in the BMJ reports. The research in question was part of two retractions that Doolub received in 2013, one of which we covered at the time.

Doolub’s research examined ways to treat and avoid microvascular obstruction — that is, blocked arteries. Doolub did the work while at Oxford.

“Intracoronary Adenosine versus Intravenous Adenosine during Primary PCI for ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction: Which One Offers Better Outcomes in terms of Microvascular Obstruction?” was published in International Scholarly Research Notices Cardiology and has not yet been cited, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

As the BMJ reports, in that paper,

Continue reading Doctor suspended in UK after faking co-authors, data

Psychologist Jens Förster earns second and third retractions as part of settlement

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Jens Förster

High-profile social psychologist Jens Förster has earned two retractions following an investigation by his former workplace. He agreed to the retractions as part of a settlement with the German Society for Psychology (DGPs).

The papers are two of eight that were found to contain “strong statistical evidence for low veracity.” According to the report from an expert panel convened at the request of the board of the University of Amsterdam, following

an extensive statistical analysis, the experts conclude that many of the experiments described in the articles show an exceptionally linear link. This linearity is not only surprising, but often also too good to be true because it is at odds with the random variation within the experiments.

One of those eight papers was retracted in 2014. In November, the American Psychology Association received an appeal to keep two of the papers, and Förster agreed to the retractions of two more:

Continue reading Psychologist Jens Förster earns second and third retractions as part of settlement

“We are living in hell:” Authors retract 2nd paper due to missing raw data

ijcA 2006 paper investigating the effects of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and celecoxib on prostate cancer cells has been retracted because it appears to contain panels that were duplicated, and the authors could not provide the raw data to show otherwise.

This is the second paper the authors have lost because they couldn’t furnish the original data to defend their work against allegations of image manipulation. The reason: the Institute for Cancer Prevention in New York, where the authors did the work, shut its doors abruptly in 2004, co-author Bhagavathi A. Narayanan told us. (The institute closed thanks to $5.7 million in grant that was misspent, the New York Post reported at the time.)

Recently, some of Narayanan’s papers have been questioned on PubPeer; her work has been the subject of an investigation at New York University, where Narayanan is now based.

Narayanan told us that the criticism of their work has deeply affected her and her co-authors:

Continue reading “We are living in hell:” Authors retract 2nd paper due to missing raw data

Former accounting prof adds his 33rd retraction

James Hunton
James Hunton

Former accounting professor James Hunton has added a 33rd retraction to his total, solidifying his position at #10 on our leaderboard.

Hunton’s official total is 33.5, since one journal retracted only one section of a paper, making it a “partial” retraction. Most of those retractions came last year, the fallout from an investigation at Bentley University which concluded that the accounting researcher had committed misconduct. Hunton resigned from the university in 2012 after his first retraction, citing family matters.

After the Bentley University investigation, the journal Contemporary Accounting Research conducted its own review of the paper, and found “no credible evidence exists to support the validity of the data in the study,” according to the retraction note for “Decision Aid Reliance: A Longitudinal Field Study Involving Professional Buy-Side Financial Analysts.”

Here’s the entire retraction note:

Continue reading Former accounting prof adds his 33rd retraction

Author in 2014 peer review ring loses 3 more papers for peer review problems

cover (1)A journal is retracting three papers — including one that is highly cited — after learning the reviewers that recommended publication had conflicts of interest.

This is a case of family values gone awry: The author common to all papers is Cheng-Wu Chen at the National Kaohsiung Marine University in Taiwan, the twin brother of one Peter Chen, who was a the center of a peer review ring that SAGE busted in 2014 (and holder of the number #3 spot on our leaderboard). Cheng-Wu Chen apparently wasn’t an innocent bystander in that episode: Of the 60 retracted papers by SAGE, Cheng-Wu Chen was a co-author on 21.

The retraction notes for all three papers — published in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries — are identical:

Continue reading Author in 2014 peer review ring loses 3 more papers for peer review problems

Firefly paper flagged following Queensland investigation

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A BMC journal has added an expression of concern to a paper on firefly genes after a University of Queensland investigation determined a table should be credited to a different source.

According to a representative of the university, the investigation found no evidence of misconduct. The university submitted an erratum that the journal chose not to publish; in the EOC note, the journal says the wording of the erratum is “under dispute.”

The erratum submitted to the journal specifies that the table should be attributed to former UQ biologist Robert Birch, who was not an author on the paper. The investigation concluded that the authors had not committed misconduct and “acted in good faith” in using the table, Anton Middelberg, University of Queensland Pro-Vice-Chancellor told us.

The paper, “Synthetic versions of firefly luciferase and Renilla luciferase reporter genes that resist transgene silencing in sugarcane, published in BMC Plant Biology, has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s the expression of concern:

Continue reading Firefly paper flagged following Queensland investigation

2001 sepsis paper “deviates from the ethical standard of authorship,” says journal

Screen Shot 2016-02-11 at 1.50.33 PMWe don’t have a lot of information on a recent retraction of a 2001 paper published in a Japanese journal — just a brief and strongly worded note explaining that it follows “a strict, extensive, and judicious review.”

The paper, retracted 14 years after it was published, describes patients in Okinawa, Japan who developed severe symptoms following infection by bacteria belonging to the Aeromonas genus. One example:

The one patient was a 15-year-old high school girl student, who had been healthy in her school life, was admitted to the hospital with a sudden onset of left thigh muscle pain and swelling. She subsequently went into septic shock and died one day after admission. Pathological examination on autopsy revealed massive gas formation, skin bullas and ulcers, and extensive severe soft tissue damage throughout the body.

“Aeromonas species infection with severe clinical manifestation in Okinawa, Japan-association with gas gangrene” has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. It was published in a Japanese journal, Rinsho Biseibutshu Jinsoku Shindan Kenkyukai Shi — which translates to the Journal of the Association for Rapid Method and Automation in Microbiology.

The retraction note suggests that there are major flaws:  Continue reading 2001 sepsis paper “deviates from the ethical standard of authorship,” says journal

Peer reviewer steals text for his own chemistry paper, gets sanctioned by journal

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A peer reviewer apparently thought portions of a manuscript he was reviewing were so good he wanted them for himself.

Substantial sections of a paper that Junwei Di reviewed appear in his own paper on a method for making tiny particles of silver to precise specifications. Di is a chemist at Soochow University in China. The journal has banned Di from submitting papers or serving as a peer reviewer “for a certain time.”

The retraction note for the 2015 paper, “Controllable Electrochemical Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles on Indium-Tin-Oxide-Coated Glass” explains how the editors at ChemElectroChem became aware of the plagiarism:

Continue reading Peer reviewer steals text for his own chemistry paper, gets sanctioned by journal