by country – Page 19 – Retraction Watch

Researcher formerly of OSU and Taiwan’s Academia Sinica gets 10-year ban

After a 20-month investigation, Taiwan’s leading science institution has hit a former star cancer researcher with a 10-year ban for research misconduct.

Academia Sinica (AS) said its inquiry found that Ching-shih Chen, formerly a distinguished research fellow at the center, was guilty of fabricating or falsifying data in several of the nearly two dozen papers he’d published while affiliated with the institution from 2014 to 2018. AS said Chen was being directed to retract one of the affected papers and correct three others.

A 2018 article in the Taipei Times quoted an AS official, Henry Sun, saying that Chen, who resigned his post there that year, admitted that his staff had “beautified” his results and that he kept loose reins over this lab.

A paper on cats and female students uses up one of its nine lives

Facing a social media storm, a biology journal has temporarily removed a paper arguing that the proliferation of feral cats around university campuses in China is directly related to the proportion of female students — who evidently are more welcoming than men of the wild felines.

The article, “Where there are girls, there are cats,” appeared in Biological Conservation, launching a withering Tweet storm with, at last count, more than 275 replies. The comments ranged from incredulous to outraged, with at least one user noting that the paper was submitted, revised and accepted within a period of about 10 days.

Fourth retraction for Haruko Obokata, focus of STAP cell scandal, after Harvard investigation

More than five years after Nature retracted two highly suspect papers about what had been described as a major breakthrough in stem cell research, another journal has pulled a paper about the work.

The scandal over so-called STAP stem cells took down more than just a few articles. The case centered on Haruko Obokata, a Japanese researcher who conducted the studies as a post-doc in the Harvard lab of Charles Vacanti. Obokata lost her doctoral thesis from Waseda University in 2015 because it plagiarized from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She also retracted a paper in Nature Protocols.

‘Those unfortunate events:’ Second retraction for stem cell scientist in Canada accused of misconduct

McMaster’s University Hall, via Wikipedia

Citing a misconduct investigation, the journal Stem Cells has retracted a 2009 article coauthored by a researcher whose work has been under suspicion for roughly five years.

The paper was titled “Cell adhesion and spreading affect adipogenesis from embryonic stem cells: the role of calreticulin.” The retraction notice, which is behind a paywall, states:

Journal flags papers two years after university investigation finds researcher faked data

Nearly two years after a University of Liverpool investigation determined that a former researcher there fabricated his data, the journal Molecular Medicine has issued expressions of concern about four papers by that researcher.

As we reported in 2018, Daniel J. Antoine — once a promising young liver specialist — was found to have made up much of his spectroscopic findings. According to the university:

Group that reused cheese cloth in different experiments up to six retractions

The other day, we reported on the retraction this month of a paper that was laid low by reuse of experimental materials — cheese cloth, to be exact — when fresh were required.

At the time, we asked the senior author, Donghai Wang, of Kansas State University, whether any other articles from his group had similar problems. Wang’s response was no — but it turns out the group already had five other retractions in December, and has requested another.

All are from the same journal, Bioresource Technology.

These retractions include the August 2019 paper titled “A study on the association between biomass types and magnesium oxide pretreatment.” According to the notice:

There are retractors in plastic surgery — and not just of the instrument kind

A plastic surgeon in Turkey has notched his fifth retraction for plagiarism and other issues.

That makes him a retractor — even if most plastic surgeons would have something else in mind if they used that term.

Ilteris Murat Emsen, then of the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery at the Numune State Hospital in Erzurum, has lost five papers dating back to 2006. Four were pulled in 2009. The most recent retraction appeared last month in the European Journal of Plastic Surgery, for a 2007 article titled “Management of the large septal perforations with the support of porous high-density polyethylene (MEDPOR).”

According to the notice:

Two retractions prove fresh is best

To the list of best practices in experimental research, here’s another item to add: Always use fresh cheesecloth when separating biomasses.

We’ll explain.

Journal retracted at least 17 papers for self-citation, 14 with same first author

A medical journal in Italy has retracted at least 17 papers by researchers in that country who appear to have been caught in a citation scam. The journal says it also fired three editorial board members for “misconduct” in the matter.

The retractions, from Acta Medica Mediterranea, occurred in 2017 and 2018, but we’re just finding out about them now; 14 involve roughly the same group of neuroscientists, while three are by different authors from some of the same institutions as the first team.

The journal last year issued two statements on its website about the cases, which it began investigating in 2018. The first, on Feb. 1, 2019 (we think), declared:

Nobel winner retracts paper from Science

A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.

Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:

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