Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.
Ten years after a neuroscientist was fired from his job at a Veterans Administration Medical Center, he has won a challenge of the decision.
Wayne State University, where the researcher, Christian Kreipke, was studying traumatic brain injury, fired him in February 2012 following a research misconduct investigation that found he had faked data. At the time Kreipke had a dual appointment at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit.
Kreipke maintains that Wayne State investigated him in retaliation for asking questions about how the university administered grant funding. He filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired alleging that the university had committed grant fraud against the federal government, to the tune of $169 million. In 2014, a judge dismissed the case.
A researcher who used similar, related, or identical research to publish over 30 studies in various academic journals will have four more of those papers retracted, bringing his total to ten retractions, Retraction Watch has learned.
Hossein Mohammadhosseini was formerly listed as a researcher at the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Technology, Malaysia. His retracted papers all relate to a method to make more sustainable concrete by adding metalized plastic fibers, polypropylene fibers, and/or palm oil fuel ash.
Four of Mohammadhosseini’s studies are being retracted from the Journal of Cleaner Production. They are:
In 2018, a newly minted PhD made an uncomfortable discovery.
At a conference, he saw other researchers presenting the results of their attempt to replicate the work of one of his fellow students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who had found a relationship between heavy rainfall and the number of prisoners in Nigeria in the first half of the 20th century.
Tokyo’s Waseda University is investigating alleged misconduct by an assistant professor at the institution, Retraction Watch has learned.
The probe is focusing on at least three works by Woohyang Sim, of the Faculty of International Research and Education, including her 2020 doctoral dissertation, titled “What is Higher Education For? Educational Aspirations and Career Prospects of Women in the Arab Gulf.” Two of Sim’s published papers are also under scrutiny, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
In June 2022, an anonymous commenter on PubPeer flagged several problems with these publications, as well as with Sim’s master’s thesis and another one of her papers. That same month, a whistleblower notified the Japanese government about the concerns, according to the source.
A university in Japan has revoked the doctoral degree of a former student found to have manipulated images and graphs in a dissertation and two published papers.
“Although our university has been working to raise awareness of research ethics in order to prevent research misconduct, it is extremely regrettable that such a situation has occurred,” Tohoku University President Hideo Ohno said in an announcement made on March 30 (translated from the Japanese using Google Translate).
The school did not name the former student, who was first author on both papers. But details mentioned in its investigation report (in Japanese) point to a researcher called Nan Li. Li was also named on a blog in Japan that covered the case (in Japanese).
In my prior career as an investigative science journalist and now as a whistleblower lawyer, I’ve seen institutions react to allegations of scientific fraud in two ways.
The first could be called “Investigate and Disclose.” This strategy was exemplified by Bell Laboratories’ 2002 investigation of allegations that Jan Hendrik Schön, a member of the technical staff, mishandled data. The allegations were published in The New York Times in May. In September, Bell Labs released a thorough report on its inquiry revealing fabrications in multiple Nature and Science papers, which were promptly retracted. The report made possible a 2009 book I wrote about the scandal, because once a proper investigation began (and it took a while to get going), the company clarified within months that Schön had faked his data.
The second, more common response is “Delay and Deny” or “Delay and Downplay,” which is a more common – but insidious – strategy. A Delay and Deny response is not helpful to anyone outside a tiny inner circle of administrators, irrespective of the merit of the allegations.
An investigation at McMaster University found that Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist by training who has had 15 papers retracted in the last three years, “engaged in fabrication and falsification” including duplicating data, according to summarized findings sent to coauthors.
Kate Laskowski, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, shared on Twitter the summary McMaster had sent her about three papers she had coauthored with Pruitt.
Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee chair Greg Clark
A new report from a UK Parliament committee calls for scientific publishers to correct and retract papers much quicker than they currently do, for the sake of research integrity and reproducibility.
The report is an extensive look at current issues of reproducibility and research integrity, and includes many recommendations. About the role of scientific publishers, the report says:
The retraction notices, issued in late March by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the U.K., all state that:
The authors informed the Editor that the characterization of the original samples was outsourced, and they do not have the original raw data for the published results.
Given the significance of the concerns about the validity of the data, and the lack of raw data, the findings presented in this paper are not reliable.
The corresponding author, Dhanaraj Gopi of Periyar University in Tamil Nadu, had several papers flagged on PubPeer starting in 2019, including some that have not been retracted.
