A team led by David Latchman, a geneticist and administrator at University College London, has notched a mysterious retraction in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and has had 25 more papers questioned on PubPeer.
Hindawi journal PPAR Research has pulled a cancer immunology paper after discovering it contained almost no new information.
Instead, it was a Frankenstein-style stitch job, containing sentences ripped from 33 different papers. 18 of those ended up in the citations; for 15 more, the authors didn’t even do them that courtesy. You can see a meticulously color-coded call out here.
A pair of cell biologists have taken responsibility for extensive figure errors that scuttled their paper in the Journal of Cell Biology.
While there were five authors, first and last authors Eva Szabo and Michal Opas took responsibility in the notice. A number of figures “contain incorrect data and/or presentation errors,” and the original data isn’t available for verification. The notice is unusually clear about which figures and data are compromised.
The paper was published in 2008, and retracted on January 12, 2015. It has been cited 32 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
The paper, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, focused on geothermal energy, while the government report was far broader in scope. However, the lack of independent research was enough to sink the review. We covered another Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews retraction recently, making us wonder if this is part of a crack-down for the journal.
The Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy has retracted a 2014 paper by a group of South Korean researchers after determining that the authors had doubled up on their publishing odds by submitting the manuscript to a competing journal.
The article was titled “A comparative study of low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with or without chemical peeling using Jessner’s solution in melasma patients,” and it purported to find that:
This study suggests Jessner’s peel is a safe and effective method in the early course of treatment for melasma when combined with low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser.
A graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver faked data in his work at a drug research lab that has notched two retractions and an expression of concern over “data integrity,” according to an extensive university investigation.
It seems like many more retractions are on the horizon for grad student Rajendra Kadam, who worked in the lab of Uday Kompella, a pharmaceutical researcher at the university.
A computer scientist in India has lost a 2013 paper on satellite imaging because he submitted — and published — essentially the same article three times.
The long-running feud between Italian physicists Ignazio Ciufolini and Lorenzo Iorio (which we’ve covered here and here) turned up a notch in November, when Ciufolini filed a defamation lawsuit against Iorio.
You can read the full lawsuit here (in Italian). The gist is this: Iorio accused Ciufolini of criticizing the work of other physicists on ArXiv.org under two separate pseudonyms (in a letter which the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, which published his claims, later retracted, saying it was a matter better handled locally). Iorio later left critical comments on articles about Ciufolini on the Science blog,Neuroskeptic, and an Italian newspaper La Repubblica‘s website.
