An associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification, Retraction Watch has learned.
Concerns had been raised about four papers by Maya Saleh and colleagues: Continue reading McGill committee says Nature figures were “intentionally contrived and falsified”
A top cardiology researcher, Robert Hegele, of the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, has retracted a 15-year-old review after editors were made aware that it was “very similar” to another of his reviews.
Here’s the December 2012 notice for the paper, which has been cited 23 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Duplication leads to retraction of 1997 paper on heart disease genes
Dongqing Li, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has been suspended without pay for four months resulting from an investigation into a paper he published that contained rampant plagiarism.
Oh, and the offending article appeared in a journal Li founded — and of which he was the top editor.
The Globe and Mail has a CTV video report about the university’s actions, which you can watch here. As we reported back in August, Li and a graduate student, Yasaman Daghighi, were forced to retract their 2010 article in Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, “Induced-charge electrokinetic phenomena” because: Continue reading University of Waterloo suspends researcher who published plagiarized paper — in his own journal
A group of neuroscientists has retracted a paper published earlier this last year in Diabetes after realizing that a figure that took up a whole page of the paper may not have been quite right.
Here’s the notice for “Blockade of receptor for advanced glycation end products in a model of type 1 diabetic leukoencephalopathy”: Continue reading Authors retract Diabetes paper after submitting it “without knowledge of inherent errors”
Last month, we brought you news that Pfizer had retracted a paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology
purporting to show a benefit of their experimental drug for lung cancer figitumumab after discovering that its clinical lead on the project had done analyses improperly.
There’s been another retraction, of a related paper, in the British Journal of Cancer, “Pre-treatment levels of circulating free IGF-1 identify NSCLC patients who derive clinical benefit from figitumumab.” Here’s the notice: Continue reading Another retraction for Pfizer’s experimental cancer treatment figitumumab
As Werner Heisenberg famously conjectured, you can’t measure an atomic particle’s momentum and position at the same time. But perhaps the principle named for the German physicist and godfather of quantum mechanics should be applied to another important scientific truth: you can’t publish the same article in two different but competing journals.
Just ask a group led by Ted Sargent, a prominent physicist at the University of Toronto. He and his colleagues recently lost a paper in Thin Solid Films — which sounds like it ought to be the name of an indie movie company, dibs! — on quantum dot solar cells. (If those sound familiar to readers of this blog, there’s a good reason. We wrote about the retraction of another quantum dot paper, this one in Nature Photonics, in October of this year.)
Sargent’s article, “Advances in colloidal quantum dot solar cells: The depleted-heterojunction device,” which he wrote with colleagues in Spain and Switzerland, appeared in August 2011. According to the notice: Continue reading Quantum physicists learn about Heisenberg’s (publishing) uncertainty principle the hard way
Forgive us if we’re a tad skeptical here, but we’re not convinced about the, um, sincerity of the following retraction notice.
The International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has retracted a paper it published earlier this year by a group of Canadian researchers who had already published the same paper in a different journal.
The article, “Spectroscopic investigation of collagen scaffolds impregnated with AgNPs coated by PEG/TX-100 mixed systems,” came from researchers at the University of Saskatchewan and appeared in the April issue of the IJBM.
But according to the notice: Continue reading “Administrative error” leads to duplication retraction
Canada’s University of Waterloo is racking up the retractions, with one in July for plagiarism, another earlier this month for faked data from a graduate student who had her master’s degree revoked, and now a third for duplication.
Here’s the notice, for “The influence of friends, family, and older peers on smoking among elementary school students: Low-risk students in high-risk schools,” which appeared in Preventive Medicine in March 2006: Continue reading Another retraction from University of Waterloo, this time for duplication
On Friday, we reported on the case of a retraction in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology by kinesiology researchers at Canada’s University of Waterloo for data fabrication by a graduate student, Sara Michelle Norris. We heard back from Waterloo yesterday, and have more details.
In our Friday post, we wondered whether Norris’s 2009 masters’ thesis,“Contribution of Sarcoplasmic Reticulum Calcium Pumping to Resting Mouse Muscle Metabolism,” might have been compromised. Waterloo tells us Norris is no longer at the university: Continue reading Update: Data fabricator had masters’ degree revoked
Kinesiology researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have been forced to retract a 2010 paper in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology in the wake of revelations that the first author, then a graduate student, fabricated her data.
The paper, “ATP consumption by sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ pumps accounts for 50% of resting metabolic rate in mouse fast and slow twitch skeletal muscle,” was written by Sarah Michelle Norris and colleagues and published in March 2010.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Data fabrication fells muscle physiology paper