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:
Continue reading Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation
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 paper, “Musical practice and BDNF plasma levels as a potential marker of synaptic plasticity: an instrument of rehabilitative processes,” was written by Alessandro Minutillo, now of the Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation at the University of Milan and appeared in Neurological Sciences. His two co-authors included Massimo Carlo Mauri, a prominent psychiatrist at the Department of Neurosciences and Mental Health, Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, also in Milan.
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.”)
Per the authors:
Continue reading Who owns your thesis data? We do, says one university, prompting retractionLots of good stories are hiding behind retraction notices, and with the flood of retractions — 2,200 just in 2020 — we can’t always keep up. Here’s a story about one 2020 retraction that turns out to involve a rector in Poland who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis.
In 2014, Błażej Kochański defended his PhD thesis at Gdańsk University of Technology, where he is now an assistant professor. To pass the exam, two external reviewers — one of whom was Jerzy Gwizdała, an economist at the University of Gdańsk — evaluated his work.
The following year, Gwizdała published a study titled, “Wpływ systemowego ryzyka płynności na stabilność gospodarki polskiej,” or “The Impact of Systemic Liquidity Risk on Stability of the Polish Economy,” in Problemy Zarządzania (Management Issues). Entire sections of that paper, according to a note Kochański sent us through our database Google form, were “copy-and-paste” plagiarized from his PhD thesis.
Gwizdała also translated sections of Kochański’s PhD thesis to English in 2018, sent it to the University of Gdańsk Publishing House, and had it published as a book chapter.
Continue reading The rector who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis
A researcher in Canada whose once-brilliant career in kinesiology went from plaudits from his peers to criminal charges of horrific abuse of his wife has notched his third retraction.
As we reported in 2018, Abdeel Safdar, formerly of McMaster University and Harvard, where he was a postdoc, was the subject of an institutional investigation over concerns about the integrity of the data in a pair of his published studies. At the time, journals had flagged only two of his articles, both written with a frequent co-author, Mark Tarnopolsky, of McMaster. Tarnopolsky is considered a leading figure in kinesiology, and together he and Safdar had written some 30 papers.
The newest retraction involves a 2016 article in Skeletal Muscle titled “Exercise-induced mitochondrial p53 repairs mtDNA mutations in mutator mice.” Safdar was first author and Tarnopolsky the senior and corresponding author.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Researcher charged with abusing his wife has third paper retracted
The University of Tasmania has cleared one of its scientists of wrongdoing after she was accused by the Australian logging industry of publishing flawed research linking logging to increased forest flammability and of having a conflict of interest with an environmental group.
The university then implemented mandatory research integrity training for its school of geography, which Jennifer Sanger, the researcher who worked in that school, suggests is due to the university’s “very strong ties with the forestry industry.”
In May 2020, Sanger published a study titled, “Propensities of Old Growth, Mature and Regrowth Wet Eucalypt Forest, and Eucalyptus Nitens Plantation, to Burn during Wildfire and Suffer Fire-Induced Crown Death,” in the journal Fire. The study found that logged forests were generally more flammable than those left unlogged, a finding that has been upheld in recent research.
On August 13, Sanger requested that Fire pull the study, according to Alistair Smith, the journal’s editor-in-chief. Sanger asked for a retraction after a reader went through the study’s dataset and found issues with its analysis, she explained in an email:
Continue reading University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations
Nanotechnology researchers in Japan, who in November retracted a paper in Nature for lack of reproducibility, have retracted two more articles after what they said was a failure to replicate their findings.
As we reported previously, the authors, led by Kenichiro Itami of Nagoya University, called for an investigation into the problems with their work, the conclusions of which have yet to be made public.
The new retractions involve articles published in ACS Applied Nano Materials.
Here’s the notice for “Graphene Nanoribbon Dielectric Passivation Layers for Graphene Electronics,” a paper which appeared in July 2019 and has been cited 11 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:
Continue reading Nanotech group that retracted Nature study pulls two more papers
A publisher retracted a book last year after the home institution of one of the editors, the University of Hawai’i, “identified research protocol violations by two of the editors, which constitute Serious Non-Compliance.”
The 2019 book, Voices of Social Justice and Diversity in a Hawai‘i Context, was edited by Amarjit Singh and Mike Devine, of Memorial University in Newfoundland, and M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz of the University of Hawai’i.
According to the book’s description, it:
Continue reading “Serious non-compliance” prompts retraction of book on social justice in Hawai’i
An engineering researcher is up to nine retractions for image issues, having lost eight papers in the last month.
Yashvir Singh, of India’s Graphic Era University — ironically enough, given the reasons for the retractions — is the first author on seven of the papers, and second author on the eighth, which appeared between 2016 and 2019. All eight articles were published in journals owned by Taylor & Francis, and have been cited more than 80 times in total, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Issues with the 2017 paper “Effect of load on friction and wear characteristics of Jatropha oil bio-lubricants,” in Biofuels were flagged in a post on PubPeer last July.
Biofuels issued this notice on January 18:
Continue reading Engineering professor up to nine retractions for image problems
A materials scientist in Japan was found guilty of plagiarism and fabrication of data in a May 2019 paper, resulting in a six-month suspension, according to her institution.
Ye Zhang, of the Bioinspired Soft Matter Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), was the senior author of “Enzyme-mediated dual-targeted-assembly realizes a synergistic anticancer effect,” which appeared in Chemical Communications on May 9, 2019. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
According to OIST’s report on the case, five days after publication of the paper, a post-doc at the university filed a complaint with the school’s hotline, alleging that the article contained fabrication and plagiarism.
A month later, Zhang submitted a revised version of the paper to the journal, which issued the following correction:
Continue reading Okinawa university suspends researcher for six months following findings of plagiarism and faked data
In September 2019 Nicola Smith, a molecular pharmacologist in Australia, faced a brutal decision. She’d realized that she’d made a mistake — or rather, failed to catch a mistake in her group’s research before the crippling error was published — in two academic articles which were the culmination of years of work. And she could either tell the world, or pretend it never happened.
Her students had been having trouble reproducing lab data. Once she looked into it and she figured out why, she told them, “Guys, you’re not going to believe this.” A cloning error had ensured the experiments were doomed to fail from the start.
If she came clean, she knew that at least one of the articles would most likely be retracted and she’d have to live with a lasting mark on her and her team’s record. “What can I do to minimize the impact” on her two students? Smith thought at the time.
In particular, Tony Ngo,who was first author on both papers and had recently finished a PhD in her lab, was looking forward to a future in academia. Smith was terrified of tarnishing his prospects.
What was to stop her from just keeping quiet about it?
Continue reading “The most horrific time of my career.” What do you do when you realize years of your published work is built on an error?