Category: australia retractions

Three years after work from his lab was the subject of “serious allegations,” a professor at Deakin University in Australia has left his post, Retraction Watch has learned.

In an October 6, 2020 letter to staff at Deakin’s School of Medicine obtained by Retraction Watch, Dean Gary Rogers writes that Jagat Kanwar, who joined the school’s faculty in 2006, would be leaving effective October 16. Rogers continues:

Continue reading Researcher leaves post at Australian university years after papers come under scrutiny

Science represents perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of humankind. Of all human institutions, organisations and establishments, science has proven an effective tool for driving progress. It is inherently self-correcting, and tolerates — and even demands — skepticism, challenge and self-critique. Few human institutions can make a similar claim.

However, there is increasing recognition and concern that current research incentives are perverse, and promote behaviors that undermine the very foundations of science.  Under the guise of altruism and independence, the self-serving, self-promoting nature of academic science today is typically neither declared nor acknowledged.   The dispassionate, objective analysis and presentation of data is frequently lost, as results are seen as personal (“my data”) and subservient to a personal or political agenda. As a consequence, scientists are losing their authority to speak, genuine experts are often disparaged and ignored, and our society is diminished.

Continue reading Better (publishing) background checks: A way toward greater integrity in science

A paper on the prevalence of cruel social behavior in the corporate world has been retracted, following an investigation at the authors’ university. According to the senior author, she inadvertently paraphrased a dissertation on the same topic that did not belong to her student and co-author.

On Sept. 21, 2016, Katarina Fritzon, a professor at Australia’s Bond University, and Nathan Brooks, who was Fritzon’s graduate student at the time, published “Psychopathic personality characteristics amongst high functioning populations,” in Crime Psychology Review. The paper suggested that as many as one in five corporate executives exhibited the hallmarks of a psychopath, such as lack of remorse or egocentricity.

Fritzon told Retraction Watch the paper drew largely from the introduction to Brooks’s doctoral dissertation. Along with Brooks’ research, it received media attention worldwide. But Fritzon told us that in October 2016 she received a complaint from another university about the work: Continue reading Authors retract paper on psychopathic traits in bosses