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7th retraction for heart researcher who faked patient records

1.coverAnna Ahimastos, a heart researcher who faked patient records, has notched her 7th retraction.

One more paper is expected to be retracted, according to a spokesperson from her former institution, the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Australia.

As with the other retractions, the 2005 paper in Hypertension — about how the hypertension drug ramipril may help alleviate cardiovascular disease — is being pulled after Ahimastos admitted to scientific misconduct. She asserts the data remain valid, and has not signed the retraction notice.

The Hypertension paper has been cited 63 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the retraction note in full (the language will be familiar to readers who have been following this case):

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Cancer research pioneer Robert Weinberg corrected Oncogene paper

onc_cimageRobert Weinberg, a prominent cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute, issued a correction to a paper in Oncogene in May, fixing two errors missed during proofing.

We found this one a little late, obviously. It also appears to be a relatively minor correction, not one that appears worthy of retraction. We’ve gotten feedback from readers asking why we cover corrections; we chose to flag this one because Weinberg has had such an impact on his field — he discovered the first tumor-causing gene in humans, as well as the first tumor-suppressor gene — and his papers are often highly cited. He also has issued five retractions in the past, most of which for papers whose first author was a member of his lab, who is not a co-author on the Oncogene paper.

Here’s the correction note for “Thrombospondin-1 repression is mediated via distinct mechanisms in fibroblasts and epithelial cells:”

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Having non-replicable data may not hurt your rep, says study

plosoneAlthough many scientists fear putting their data to the test of replication efforts, due to the embarrassment they’d feel if their findings couldn’t be repeated, a new study suggests those fears are unfounded.

The paper, published last week in PLOS ONE, found that scientists overestimate how much having non-replicable data will hurt their careers, and the community values those who are honest about what went wrong.

Specifically, as the authors note:

Continue reading Having non-replicable data may not hurt your rep, says study

Is an increase in retractions good news? Maybe, suggests new study

SEEIn Latin America, retractions for plagiarism and other issues have increased markedly — which may be a positive sign that editors and authors are paying closer attention to publishing ethics, according to a small study published in Science and Engineering Ethics.

The authors examined two major Latin American/Caribbean databases, which mostly include journals from Brazil, and have been indexing articles for more than 15 years. They found only 31 retractions, all of which appeared in 2008 or later. (Roughly half of the retractions were from journals indexed in the Thomas Reuters’  Journal of Citations Report®  (JCR).)

This was a notable result, the authors write: Continue reading Is an increase in retractions good news? Maybe, suggests new study

NSF investigating as more falsified results surface from mol bio researcher

Screen Shot 2015-12-04 at 5.22.53 PMAuthors of a paper on the origin and function of a family of transmembrane proteins have retracted it after an investigation at the University of Florida revealed that an author had falsified some results.

This is the third paper with falsifications that Chi Leung, a former UF postdoc, is responsible for; this summer, we reported on a retraction and a partial retraction of two other papers on which Leung was a co-author. The case is currently under investigation by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity National Science Foundation, a UF spokeswoman tells us.

The problems in the paper, “Phylogenetic, expression, and functional analyses of anoctamin homologs in Caenorhabditis elegans,” occur in a figure that compares mRNA levels in control and experimental populations of C. elegans. The paper was published in the American Journal of Physiology, and has been cited eight times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

The retraction note explains that, according to the other authors, much of the data in the paper are valid:

Continue reading NSF investigating as more falsified results surface from mol bio researcher

Authors lied about ethics approval for study on obesity, depression

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Obesity has retracted a study that suggested overweight people may be less depressed than their slimmer counterparts in cultures where fat isn’t stigmatized, after realizing the authors lied about having ethical approval to conduct the research.

The authors claimed their research protocol had been approved by Norwegian and Bangladeshi ethical committees, but, according to the retraction note, part of the study “was conducted without the required approval of the university ethics board.” The journal’s managing editor told us that there is no evidence that there was harm to the study subjects.

Here’s more from the retraction note for “In Bangladesh, overweight individuals have fewer symptoms of depression than nonoverweight individuals:”

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Astrophysicists issue two detailed corrections

1.coverA group of astrophysicists has notched a pair of corrections for papers on galaxy clusters, thanks to an error that affected several figures in the papers, but not the overall conclusions.

The errors came in the catalog of “mock” galaxies that first author Fabio Zandanel, a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, created to model features that are found in clusters of galaxies. Two mistakes canceled each other out “almost perfectly,” says Zandanel, making the changes that resulted from them subtle.

Zandanel explained the errors to us:

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Five years after a retraction, company’s stock is up more than 500%

wntloggawntresearchwebny1Is ethical behavior good for business?

Five years ago this month, Swedish pharmaceutical company WntResearch immediately notified shareholders when authors retracted a 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper on a potential cancer therapy that was key to the company’s business.

At the time, the company’s decision to disclose the retraction hurt its finances, as WntResearch delayed its planned initial public offering for three weeks. It also offered investors and shareholders the opportunity to withdraw their shares of WntResearch stock.

But, aside from one of the paper’s co-authors, “No one did that,” Nils Brünner, WntResearch’s CEO, told us. Since the company’s IPO on December 17, 2010, its stock price has increased from Continue reading Five years after a retraction, company’s stock is up more than 500%

Cancer researcher contributed “false data” to 11 studies

ori-logoA former cancer researcher has falsified data in 11 studies, according to the results of a investigation scheduled to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow.

The Office of Research Integrity’s findings are based on an inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Girija Dasmahapatra worked until July of this year, investigating possible therapies for cancer. The misconduct affected research funded by three grants from the National Institutes of Health. Steven Grant, a researcher at VCU, is the principal investigator on the grants, each of which total over $2 million in funding. All of the 11 affected papers will be corrected or retracted, according to the ORI notice.

Two of the papers containing “falsified and/or fabricated” data — a study on an experimental combination of drugs for blood cancer and one on chemotherapies for rare forms of lymphoma  — were covered in press releases by VCU.

According to the notice in the Federal Register:

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Investigation into CT scan paper reveals plagiarism

Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 10.02.20 AMA paper on the quality of computed tomography (CT) images of the human body didn’t stand up to a close examination. It’s been retracted after an investigation found that it plagiarized work from two publications and a poster by another researcher.

The text in the Journal of the Korean Physical Society paper was taken from work by Kenneth Weiss, a radiologist at the University of Miami, and Jane Weiss, CFO of the couple’s medical imaging company. According to emails that Jane Weiss forwarded to us, Kenneth Weiss brought the plagiarism to light after a PhD student pointed out the similarities between the JKPS paper and one of Weiss’s in the American Journal of Roentgenology. Weiss notified the AJR in January. They started an investigation into the matter, and alerted the JKPS.

The retraction note for “Measurement of image quality in CT images reconstructed with different kernels” provides more details about the investigation:

Continue reading Investigation into CT scan paper reveals plagiarism