A researcher faked data and a masters degree, according to an investigation by Columbia University.
He’s also earned his fourth retraction. The new notice, along with one we’ve uncovered from 2014, provide some information on the extent of the deception of Robert Frumento, who left Columbia a decade ago, around the time that the now-retracted papers were published.
Here’s the new retraction notice:
Continue reading Columbia investigation reveals researcher faked data — and a degree
Twitter is abuzz today over allegations that a recent paper in Scientific Reports contains a blatant example of duplication.
According to the allegations, a group of researchers in Malaysia have used the same four images to represent some 30 cells at different stages of cell death. One researcher has even suggested the allegedly doctored images appear in three different papers.
Is this a manipulated image? See for yourself:
Continue reading Author denies accusations of blatant duplication
Against the authors’ wishes, a pharmacology journal has retracted a paper after receiving two messages questioning the “soundness of the experimental results.”
The editors of the journal, Frontiers in Pharmacology, issued an expression of concern about the paper in April 2016, and investigated it following the allegations. According to the retraction notice, the authors disagree with the retraction.
Here’s the retraction notice for the paper: Continue reading Pharmacology journal pulls paper for “insufficient scientific quality;” authors disagree
So far, we’ve counted more than 300 papers that have been retracted after editors suspected the peer-review process had been compromised — and we’re adding three more to the list.
Editors of the Journal of Food Processing and Preservation became suspicious of the three papers after discovering similarities in reports from supposedly different reviewers. When they were unable to verify the identities of the reviewers, they pulled the papers.
An editor told us that he thinks the reviewer identities were fabricated entirely (as opposed to stolen):
Continue reading Three more papers felled by suspected fake reviews
A team of researchers from Japan has earned a fifth retraction, after co-authors told the journal that they did not participate in much of the paper.
Yoshihiro Sato, listed at Mitate Hospital, is the only author of the paper who was not “honorary,” the managing editor of the journal confirmed. He and the same co-authors recently lost three other papers about preventing hip fractures for “concerns regarding data integrity” and authorship issues — one of those papers, published in JAMA, specified that Sato was responsible for the data. All four authors were also included in a retraction last year of a paper with “concerns about the underlying data;” there, too, Sato said his co-authors were named “for honorary reasons.”
Here’s the retraction notice for “Alendronate and vitamin D2 for prevention of hip fracture in Parkinson’s disease: A randomized controlled trial,” published in Movement Disorders:
Continue reading “All co-authors are honorary:” Team earns fifth retraction
Authors have retracted a pair of PLOS ONE papers after an investigation suggested the articles might contain some fiction.
In the papers, the authors describe collecting and analyzing the DNA of mosquitoes to look for changes following the introduction of bed nets treated with insecticides to combat malaria. However, an investigation by the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in France could not confirm some of the experiments ever took place.
Here’s the retraction notice for “How the Malaria Vector Anopheles gambiae Adapts to the Use of Insecticide-Treated Nets by African Populations,” which appears at the top of the paper:
Continue reading PLOS ONE retracts 2 malaria papers over doubts experiments ever took place
Today, we bring you a case of a serial plagiarizer.
Martin W. F. Stone was a philosophy professor at the University of Leuven — by one account “widely admired and highly respected” — until 2010, when an investigation at the school concluded that his work is “highly questionable in terms of scientific integrity.” Over the past several years, he has racked up retractions, earning his 14th this spring, and spot #30 on our leaderboard.
Stone’s retractions were brought to our attention by philosopher Michael Dougherty, who found a notice for “Michael Baius (1513–89) and the Debate on ‘Pure Nature’: Grace and Moral Agency in Sixteenth-Century Scholasticism,” a chapter in Springer’s Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity.
The retraction notice says that the chapter Continue reading Philosopher earns 14th retraction for plagiarism
Pro-life activists have asked JAMA to retract a 2005 paper that suggested fetuses can’t feel pain before the third trimester.
Critics are arguing that newer findings have shown pain sensation appears earlier in gestation, yet the 2005 data continue to be cited in the discussion around abortion. What’s more, they note, some of the authors failed to mention their ties to the abortion industry.
The 2005 paper has been cited 191 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science. We spoke with Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief at JAMA and The JAMA Network, who told us something similar to what he said last week, when PETA asked to retract a paper they claim could be harmful to elephants: Continue reading Pro-lifers call for JAMA to retract 2005 paper about fetal pain
A biologist has corrected three papers that are nearly a decade old, after concerns were raised on PubPeer.
A commenter first posted a comment about an image in one of the papers in 2013; after more comments on other papers appeared in November 2015, author Zoya Avramova at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln received emails alerting her to the threads. She has responded, including to the 2013 comment, noting “the said images should have been assembled more carefully.”
After repeating some of the experiments to verify the results, she has now issued corrections on three papers, about the genetics of model organism Arabidopsis. The papers share a first author, Abdelaty Saleh, who was a postdoc in Avramova’s lab at the time of the work.
The correction notice for “Dynamic and stable histone H3 methylation patterns at the Arabidopsis FLC and AP1 loci,” appearing in the July 2016 volume of Gene, explains: Continue reading Prompted by PubPeer, biologist corrects three papers
Researchers have fixed a number of papers after mistakenly reporting that people who hold conservative political beliefs are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness.
As one of the notices specifies, now it appears that liberal political beliefs are linked with psychoticism. That paper also swapped ideologies when reporting on people higher in neuroticism and social desirability (falsely claiming that you have socially desirable qualities); the original paper said those traits are linked with liberal beliefs, but they are more common among people with conservative values.
We’re not clear how much the corrections should inform our thinking about politics and personality traits, however, because it’s not clear from the paper how strongly those two are linked. The authors claim that the strength of the links are not important, as they do not affect the main conclusions of the papers — although some personality traits appear to correlate with political beliefs, one doesn’t cause the other, nor vice versa.
In total, three papers have been corrected by authors, and a correction has been submitted on one more.
We’ll start with an erratum that explains the backstory of the error in detail. It appears on “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,” published by the American Journal of Political Science: Continue reading Conservative political beliefs not linked to psychotic traits, as study claimed