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.
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.
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST)
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.
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:
Nicola Smith, credit Karl Welsch, Welsch Photography
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?
A pharmacy researcher at Tehran University of Medical Sciences has had three papers retracted, and one corrected, because he duplicated his other articles.
Narges Shokri, of the School of Pharmacy of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences, also in Iran, is an author of the three retracted papers, but not the corrected paper in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine.
Here’s the notice for “Comparison of Calcium Phosphate and Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles as Dermal Penetration Enhancers for Albumin,” in the Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences:
An investigation into the work of a researcher at Western University “resulted in a clear determination of research misconduct,” according to a retraction notice, but details are scant.
A Hindawi journal has retracted two 2013 papers by a group of stem cell researchers in China over issues with the images in the articles, bringing their count to three.
Here’s the notice for “Side-by-Side comparison of the biological characteristics of human umbilical cord and adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cells,” by Lili Chen and colleagues from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan:
A stem cell researcher in Japan could end up with 23 retractions after officials at his former institution confirmed that he’d committed research misconduct in nearly two dozen papers.
According to a report released last week by Aichi Gakuin University, Nobuaki Ozeki misused images, fabricated data and recycled text in 20 papers. Ozeki has had 19 papers retracted to date, 17 of which are described in the analysis. The latest report — an offshoot of one in 2018 that found he had committed misconduct in three papers — expands Ozeki’s liability to 22 articles.
A cognitive psychologist in Germany has lost one of two papers slated for retraction after her former institution found her guilty of misconduct.
In a 2019 report, Leiden University found that Lorenza Colzato, now of TU Dresden, had failed to obtain ethics ethics approval for some of her studies, manipulated her data and fabricated results in grant applications. Although the institution did not identify Colzato by name, Retraction Watch confirmed her identity.
