The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.
A tourism researcher in Japan has been suspended and demoted after university officials found that they had committed plagiarism in at least three papers in school publications.
In an August 4 statement, Atomi Gakuen Women’s University said Masami Murakami, formerly an associate professor, had been suspended from July 15 to September 14, and would now hold the rank of “full-time lecturer” at the school.
According to the statement, signed by university president Kiyoshi Kasahara, the punishment was “Based on the recognition of specific fraudulent activity (plagiarism) in the written paper.”
Ten months after a misconduct investigation into the work of a researcher in Japan four of his papers found to have serious issues have yet to be retracted.
According to an August 2020 report from National University Corporation Osaka University and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Hospital about its investigation of Takashi Nojiri:
The misconduct case of an endodontics researcher in Japan who already has lost at least 24 papers for data problems has claimed two more casualties: the PhD theses of a pair of scientists he once helped train.
As we reported last year, Nobuaki Ozeki, who retired from Aichi Gakuin University in 2018, was found to have misused images, fabricated data and recycled text in 22 papers, 21 of which by our count have now been retracted. Ozeki’s total retraction count is 24, as three papers not identified in the investigation have also been retracted.
Now, we’ve learned that the university has revoked the doctoral degrees of two of Ozeki’s co-authors, Hideyuki Yamaguchi and Rie (Satoe) Kawai. Both researchers received their degrees in March 2016.
A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have resulted from a hiccup in the way they conducted their testing.
The 2016 article, in Carcinogenesis, has played a minor role in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the makers of ranitidine (sold as Zantac, among other brand names) claiming that use of the medication has caused cancer in more than 100,000 plaintiffs. And it was a key citation in a 2019 petition to the FDA urging that such drugs be recalled.
The FDA has been investigating contamination of ranitidine and a related drug with NDMA, a known human carcinogen at high doses. On April 1, 2020, the agency announced that, although its tests did not find concerning levels of NDMA in “many” of the samples it tested, it was recalling all products that contain ranitidine:
A former endowed professor at the University of Kentucky has resigned from the faculty days before a committee at the institution was scheduled to vote on whether to fire him for misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.
In 2018, the university began investigating Xianglin Shi, a toxicologist and cancer biologist who that year, as we reported then, lost three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry for image manipulation. At the time, Shi was the principal investigator of a 5-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).
In the wake of the retractions, Shi was stripped of his title as the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and his role as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine.
Eric Lam, a highly-published cancer specialist, has been fired from his post at Imperial College London following a university investigation that found misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.
However, the new retraction marks the first such retraction for the researcher, whose LinkedIn page states that he is now affiliated with Sun Yat-Sen University, in China. According to an Imperial College London spokesperson:
A scientist in Japan has lost her doctoral degree from Kyoto University after an investigation determined that she had plagiarized in her thesis.
According to the university, Jin Jing, who received her degree in September 2012 in human and environmental studies, has become the first person at the institution to have a doctorate revoked. In a statement about the move, Kyoto University president Nagahiro Minato said:
A university in China has revoked the medical degree of a researcher found guilty of having produced his dissertation with the help of a prodigious paper mill.
As Elisabeth Bik noted last year in a post on PubPeer, the thesis by Bin Chen, a lung specialist at Soochow University, was one of 121 articles produced by the paper mill that:
Here’s a story that’s likely to strike a sour chord with graduate students.
A researcher in Italy has lost his 2020 paper, based on work he conducted for his doctoral thesis, after the university claimed that he didn’t have the right to publish the data.
The study, which Minutillo conducted while a medical student at the University of Pavia, was based on data from 48 men and women, of whom 21 were musicians and 27 were non-musicians. (In case you’re wondering: “To be defined as a “musician,” the practice of any musical instrument or voice was required for at least 3 h a week. This practice had to be stable and continued for at least 5 years and the subject had to have been achieved a musical degree.”)
