Diederik Stapel, the social psychology researcher who has had 58 papers retracted after admitting that he made up the data, has a new job: helping other researchers.
Stapel, according to BN DeStem (via Google Translate), Continue reading He’s back: Data faker Diederik Stapel will support research at vocational university
Researchers whose former colleague was recently reprimanded by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) have retracted a biology paper for duplication.
The retraction includes some familiar names: The last author Steven Grant, senior author of the newly retracted study, is also the last author of 11 papers flagged in a report by the ORI in December, 2015. That report focused on Girija Dasmahapatra, a co-author of the 11 studies who was also based at at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Dasmahapatra left VCU in 2015, and is not listed on the latest retraction.
The retracted paper, published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), was also co-authored by Paul Dent, a biochemist at the VCU, who we mentioned last year when he offered to retract another paper in Molecular Pharmacology after concerns arose on PubPeer. The journal has instead issued a lengthy correction (what we call a “mega-correction”).
A VCU spokesperson told us:
Continue reading Retraction appears for group whose former member was sanctioned by ORI
Note to self: If you’re going to duplicate your own work, don’t copy from papers that plagiarize others’ research.
Just such a mistake has cost a PhD candidate three papers — although his co-author argues that a company is in part to blame.
Hossein Jafarzadeh, who is studying mechanical engineering at the University of Tehran, apparently asked a company to complete photomicroscopy for his work. Instead of doing to the work, the company provided him with an image taken from another paper, according to Karen Abrinia, his co-author, who is based at the same institution.
That’s the explanation that Abrinia gave when we asked about three retractions that the pair share, at least.
What the notices tell us is a little more convoluted. Plagiarized material from two different papers ended up in two different papers by the pair. Then, the researchers copied from their own papers in a third paper. (We’re unclear if Abrinia attributes every step of the mess to a company or not. Confused yet?)
Continue reading A plagiarism loop: Authors copied from papers that had copied from others
PubPeer will see a surge of more than 50,000 entries for psychology studies in the next few weeks as part of an initiative that aims to identify statistical mistakes in academic literature.
The detection process uses the algorithm “statcheck” — which we’ve covered previously in a guest post by one of its co-developers — to scan just under 700,000 results from the large sample of psychology studies. Although the trends in Hartgerink’s present data are yet to be explored, his previous research suggests that around half of psychology papers have at least one statistical error, and one in eight have mistakes that affect their statistical conclusions. In the current effort, regardless of whether any mistakes are found, the results from the checks are then posted to PubPeer, and authors are alerted through an email.
Till now, the initiative is one of the biggest large-scale post-publication peer review efforts of its kind. Some researchers are, however, concerned about its current process of detecting potential mistakes, particularly the fact that potentially stigmatizing entries are created even if no errors are found. Continue reading Here’s why more than 50,000 psychology studies are about to have PubPeer entries
Retraction Watch readers may recall the case of Erin Potts-Kant, who pled guilty to embezzling funds from a lab, and now has 15 retractions, and Michael Foster, both formerly of Duke. You may also remember that we’ve featured discussions of the False Claims Act, which some attorneys are trying to use to expose wrongdoing — and earn large settlements for whistleblowers in the process.
It turns out those two threads are intertwined, as we learned only last month when a federal court case against Potts-Kant, Foster, and Duke was unsealed last month. (False Claims Act cases are frequently sealed when initially filed, with big penalties for anyone — including the attorneys — who talk about them, which is why we didn’t know of this link before.) In today’s Science, as part of our new partnership, we tell the story in a lot more detail, and describe the potential ramifications for Duke and other universities.
The whistleblower in the Duke case is named Continue reading Embezzlement, 15 retractions, and a whistleblower could add up to trouble for Duke
As the University of California Davis is reeling from the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi over alleged ethical violations, we’ve learned of more drama at the school: The fallout from a single retraction back in 2012 pushed one UC Davis professor into early retirement this summer without professor emeritus status.
What’s more, a UC Davis committee had recommended that former professor Ishwarlal “Kenny” Jialal retire early but maintain his professor emeritus status, and Katehi overruled that decision, deciding to strip Jialal of any future emeritus status.
Here’s the story: Jialal was found innocent of any research misconduct after Nutrition Reviews journal editors found portions of a 2008 review paper contained writing from the Linus Pauling Institute website, according to an internal investigation. However, after the first author — former postdoc Uma Singh, now an adjunct professor at Valencia College in Orlando — admitted to plagiarizing a passage, the investigation found Jialal sent her threatening emails in reaction to the perceived smear of the retraction on his reputation.
For instance, Continue reading Professor forced to retire after threatening co-author
Nearly 50 years ago, researchers in Uppsala, Sweden used cells from a patient to establish a brain tumor cell line that has become widely used. But a new study suggests that the most common source of that cell line used by scientists today may not be derived from that original patient’s tumor, raising questions about the results obtained in hundreds of studies.
In a new paper out today in Science Translational Medicine, Bengt Westermark, of Uppsala University, and colleagues describe what they found when they performed a forensic DNA analysis comparing the widely used version of the cell line to the original. The findings are consistent with those of other analyses in which cell lines turn out not to be what researchers thought, a problem we’ve focused some attention on.
Here’s an email interview with Westermark about the findings and their implications: Continue reading Widely used brain tumor cell line may not be what researchers thought it was
Are there instances when similarities between papers should be fixed by a correction, rather than a retraction?
We’re asking ourselves that question after seeing two journals take very different approaches to a somewhat similar situation. Last year, Frontiers in Physiology retracted a paper by Anastasios Lymperopoulos at Nova Southeastern University in Florida because of an “an unacceptable level of similarity” to a 2009 review article by different authors. But more recently, after Circulation Research discovered another paper co-authored by Lymperopoulos also contained similar text from the same 2009 review, it decided to correct the passages.
The last author of the Circulation Research paper told us the overlap between the two papers was less than 5%, and the journal never suggested the authors retract the paper.
Here’s the correction notice in Circulation Research:
Sometimes, the best way to expose a problem with the publishing process is to put it to a test — perhaps by performing a Sokal-style hoax, or submitting a paper with obvious flaws.
In 2014, that’s just what a researcher in Kosovo did. Suspicious that a journal wasn’t doing a thorough job of vetting submissions, she decided to send them an article of hers that had already appeared in another journal. Her thinking was that any journal with an honest and thorough peer review process would hesitate to publish the work. But this journal didn’t — at least at first. Though they retracted the paper this summer, it took a few twists and turns to get there.
The researcher wasn’t the only one wary of the journal — it’s on Jeffrey Beall’s list of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory publishers. Appropriately, Beall recounts the story of her sting operation on his blog. Here’s how it all went down:
Continue reading Sting operation forces predatory publisher to pull paper
A genetics researcher included falsified data in two published papers, according to a report by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) released today.
At the time of the misconduct, Andrew Cullinane was a postdoctoral fellow in the Medical Genetics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). According to his LinkedIn page, he is now an assistant professor at Howard University in Washington D.C. The university’s College of Medicine lists him as an assistant professor in the Basic Sciences/Anatomy department.
As today’s notice in the Federal Register reports, Cullinane Continue reading Former NIH postdoc doctored data