An Ivy League university is blaming an “error” for the brief disappearance of the doctoral dissertation of a former Twitter employee whose writings on gay dating apps drew public scorn from Elon Musk.
As Fox News first reported, on Saturday the PhD thesis by Yoel Roth, who until November had been Twitter’s head of trust and safety, seemed to have been removed from the University of Pennsylvania’s ScholarlyCommons website.
The science minister of Iran has amassed four retractions recently over concerns about the authenticity of chemicals used in the studies.
Mohammad Ali Zolfigol, who has held the post of Minister of Science, Research and Technology for more than a year, is first or second author in all four of the papers, which appeared between 2015 and 2016 in journals published by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry.
The authors acknowledge that they had been using the wrong substance – a molecule called tricyanomethane – claiming to have purchased a fake form of the chemical. But Zolfigol and his colleagues object to the retractions, on grounds that aren’t clear.
A lung specialist who has held positions in Iran’s Ministry of Health and National Medical Council now has two retractions and five corrections of his published papers for re-using text.
In the case of the retractions, the re-used text was an entire paper.
Esmaeil Idani (who also spells his last name “Eidani”), now affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, is a middle author on two papers retracted for republication, and corrections to two of his papers acknowledge duplicated text with each other and a third paper.
According to an online CV, Idani has worked as “Deputy Secretary of the Medical Education and Training Council” for Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and from 2013-2017 was chairman of the Supreme Medical Council of Iran. He has not responded to our request for comment.
A leading microbiology society has issued expressions of concern for four six papers from a group in France led by the controversial scientist Didier Raoult, whose lab is under investigation by the University of Aix Marseille for “serious malfunctions.”
Retractions are rolling along for numerous scientists affiliated with the Jining First People’s Hospital in Shandong, China, who were sanctioned in December for research misconduct such as tampering with data and fabricating research.
My laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School studies genetic diseases that affect the skeletal system. We became interested in the protein osteocalcin after Gerard Karsenty at Columbia University reported in several papers using knockout mice – mice lacking the genes which produce osteocalcin – that osteocalcin is a bone-derived hormone that affects glucose metabolism, insulin production, male fertility, muscle mass, and cognition. If osteocalcin functions similarly in humans, then osteocalcin becomes an exciting and clinically important protein.
To independently confirm these findings, we created our own osteocalcin knockout mouse strain. We examined glucose metabolism and male fertility in our mice and found none of the effects reported by Karsenty and colleagues; we reported our findings in May 2020. A group in Japan created a third osteocalcin knockout mouse strain which also failed to confirm Karsenty and colleagues’ findings.
In earlier years my laboratory also could not independently confirm other results reported by the Karsenty group: a paper I co-authored in 2011 found no evidence of the Wnt co-receptor LRP5 affecting blood serotonin levels, contrary to what Karsenty’s lab published.
A rheumatologist was suspended from a professional society and his license to practice medicine was threatened after he raised concerns about data manipulation in a published study for which he recruited patients, according to documents seen by Retraction Watch.
Fayad alleged that the researchers tested patient samples multiple times and used a mix of old and new values in their analysis. After he reported his concerns to the journal and then the university, which both concluded that they could not confirm or refute his allegations, he has faced apparent retaliation, including the suspension of his membership in the Lebanese Society of Rheumatology.
In comments to Retraction Watch, the corresponding author for the study noted that the two investigations did not find data manipulation, and said the issue was “based on a background of personal and professional conflicts.”
This week, Nature reported on two institutional reports that found scientists in Carlo Croce’s cancer research lab at The Ohio State University had committed research misconduct including plagiarism and data falsification.
Another institutional investigation directed at Croce did not find he committed research misconduct but did identify problems with how he managed his lab, according to Nature.
Springer Nature has retracted a 2020 chapter in a digital book – along with a related introduction – after a judge in Ireland ruled that the paper defamed another researcher and two attorneys.
Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports has retracted four papers by a researcher in Saudi Arabia who claims “irrelevant reviewers” just couldn’t understand “a new area of statistics.”
Here’s the notice for one of the articles, “Neutrosophic statistical test for counts in climatology,” which appeared in September 2021 and has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science:
