This week at Retraction Watch featured a look at the nuances of replication efforts, aka “the replication paradox,” as well as yet another story of fake peer reviews, this time at Hindawi. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: California universities battle in court for research dollars; fake conferences; fake impact factors
Category: by author
High-profile biologist is suspended after two investigations found he “breached his duty of care”, committed “misconduct”
High-profile plant biologist Olivier Voinnet has been suspended for two years from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) following the results of two investigations that revealed a number of issues in his publication record.
An investigation at ETH Zurich found that the scientist “breached his duty of care in the handling of figures as well as in his supervisory duties as a research director.”
Another investigation at CNRS, where Voinnet also works as a researcher, also found “the existence of deliberate chart/diagram manipulations” — while not “fabrication,” these breaches “amount to scientific misconduct,” according to a press release about the report.
The ETH committee uncovered multiple errors, from the “mere confusion of correct and incorrect figures” to “the ‘beautification’ of figures,” but said that it was not scientific misconduct, according to ETH guidelines:
Cancer Research retraction is fifth for Robert Weinberg; fourth for his former student
Another domino has fallen in a chain of retractions for Robert Weinberg, the man who discovered the first tumor-causing gene in humans, along with the first tumor suppressor gene: Cancer Research just retracted a paper of his on some of the molecular steps to metastasis.
The paper, “Concurrent Suppression of Integrin α5, Radixin, and RhoA Phenocopies the Effects of miR-31 on Metastasis,” has been cited 70 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As we have noted before, Weinberg’s papers are frequently highly cited. His bio at the Whitehead Institute bills him as “a pioneer in cancer research.”
Four of Weinberg’s retracted papers — including this latest — share a first author: Scott Valastyan, once a very promising grad student in Weinberg’s lab.
This retraction, like Valastyan’s others, is linked to his retracted 2009 Cell paper. (That paper was cited 482 times, and there’s even a video from the Cell press office to go with it). Continue reading Cancer Research retraction is fifth for Robert Weinberg; fourth for his former student
Weekend reads: Is failing to share data misconduct?; worst journal ever; Elsevier boycott
The big news this week at Retraction Watch was the release of more than two dozen retractions for accounting researcher James Hunton, and the sentencing of Dong-Pyou Han for scientific fraud (see more below). Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Is failing to share data misconduct?; worst journal ever; Elsevier boycott
Corrections (and one EoC) propagate for distinguished plant biologist, Olivier Voinnet
There may be some deeply rooted issues in the work of high-profile plant biologist Olivier Voinnet, biology department research director at ETH in Zurich. Corrections have continued to pile up months after his work was hit with a barrage of criticism on PubPeer. We’ve tracked a total of seven corrections over the past five months (not including the April retraction of a 2004 paper in The Plant Cell). One of the corrected papers also received an Expression of Concern this week.
Collectively, the corrected papers have accumulated more than 1200 citations.
In January, Voinnet said he planned to correct multiple papers, after receiving “an anonymous email.”
One of the recent corrections we found is for a 2003 article in The Plant Journal, “An enhanced transient expression system in plants based on suppression of gene silencing by the p19 protein of tomato bushy stunt virus,” which details using proteins from a tomato virus to help alter gene expression. The study has been cited 862 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the correction notice, posted June 8:
AIDS vaccine fraudster sentenced to nearly 5 years in prison and to pay back $7 million
A researcher who confessed to spiking rabbit blood samples to make the results of an HIV vaccine experiment look better has been sentenced to 57 months of prison time, according to The Des Moines Register.
Dong-Pyou Han has also been ordered to repay more than $7 million to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and will have three years of supervised release following his prison term.
In December, 2013, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced that Han, formerly at Iowa State University (ISU), had faked his results to make an HIV vaccine look more powerful. The faulty data made their way into seven national and international symposia between 2010 and 2012 (resulting in a retracted poster in 2014), along with three grant applications and multiple progress reports. Han agreed to a three-year research ban, and resigned from ISU in October the following year.
The NIH never sent the final $1.38 million grant payment of more than $10 million awarded to Han’s boss, Michael Cho, and ISU returned nearly $500,000 it had received for Han’s salary and other costs.
Macchiarini co-author objects to investigation’s misconduct verdict
One of Paolo Macchiarini’s co-authors on a 2011 Lancet paper describing an allegedly groundbreaking procedure to transplant an artificial trachea seeded with stem cells is objecting to a recent investigation that concluded Macchiarini had committed misconduct.
Ola Hermanson, who studies neural stem cells at Karolinska Institutet, argued in a report dated June 29 that the investigation contained “serious flaws and formal errors.”
Hermanson’s lengthy response (uploaded here except for supporting emails) is to the findings of an external review of allegations about Macchiarini’s work, conducted by Bengt Gerdin, of Uppsala University. In regards to the 2011 Lancet paper, Gerdin’s investigation found:
Continue reading Macchiarini co-author objects to investigation’s misconduct verdict
Accounting professor notches 30 (!) retractions after misconduct finding
It began with a retraction due to a “misstatement” in November 2012, which led to an investigation that found the first author, James E. Hunton, guilty of misconduct. Now, the floodgates have opened, and Hunton has 31 retractions under his belt, making him the newest addition to the Retraction Watch leaderboard.
A month after the first retraction in 2012, Hunton resigned from his accounting professorship at Bentley University, citing family and health concerns.
Then, in 2014, a university investigation concluded that Hunton fabricated data in two papers and may have destroyed evidence. The first paper was the one retracted from Accounting Review for a misstatement; the second was retracted from Contemporary Accounting Research in December 2014. Even though the investigation centered around two publications, the university suggested more may be affected:
Continue reading Accounting professor notches 30 (!) retractions after misconduct finding
Weekend reads: LaCour loses job offer; new Science data guidelines; Macchiarini grant funding frozen
This week at Retraction Watch saw us report on thousands of retractions from IEEE, which will have a serious effect on retraction record-keeping, a bizarre case of author impersonation, and a look at dentistry in outer space. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: LaCour loses job offer; new Science data guidelines; Macchiarini grant funding frozen
Weekend reads: Duplication rampant in cancer research?; meet the data detective; journals behaving badly
This week saw us profiled in The New York Times and de Volkskrant, and the introduction of our new staff writer. We also launched The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Duplication rampant in cancer research?; meet the data detective; journals behaving badly