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A university thought its misconduct investigation was complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.

When Venkata Sudheer Kumar Ramadugu, then a postdoc at the University of Michigan, admitted to the university on June 28 of last year that he had committed research misconduct in a paper that appeared in Chemical Communications in 2017, he also “attested that he did not manipulate any data in his other four co-authored publications published while at the University of Michigan.”

And so, a few days later, Michael J. Imperiale, the university’s research integrity officer, wrote a letter to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) informing them of the findings. On August 2, Ramadagu was terminated from Michigan. And on August 3, Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, the head of the lab where Ramadagu had worked, wrote a letter to Chemical Communications requesting retraction of the paper.

While the retraction would not appear until the end of November, and ORI sanctions not announced until the end of December, Michigan’s responsibilities seemed to have been discharged as of early August. But documents obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request detail how that was not the end of the story. Continue reading A university thought its misconduct investigation was complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.

Study claiming hate cuts 12 years off gay lives retracted

Low Library, Columbia University

After years of back and forth, a highly cited paper that appeared to show that gay people who live in areas where people were highly prejudiced against them had a significantly shorter life expectancy has been retracted.

The paper, “Structural stigma and all-cause mortality in sexual minority populations,”  was published in 2014 by Mark Hatzenbuehler of Columbia University and colleagues. As we reported last year, Mark Regnerus, of the University of Texas at Austin, published a paper describing his failed attempts to replicate the study in 2016: Continue reading Study claiming hate cuts 12 years off gay lives retracted

New study finds “important deficiencies” in university reports of misconduct

via NASA

Retraction Watch readers may recall the name Yoshihiro Sato. The late researcher’s retraction total — now at 51 — gives him the number four spot on our leaderboard. He’s there because of the work of four researchers, Andrew Grey, Mark Bolland, and Greg Gamble, all of the University of Auckland, and Alison Avenell, of the University of Aberdeen, who have spent years analyzing Sato’s papers and found a staggering number of issues.

Those issues included fabricated data, falsified data, plagiarism, and implausible productivity, among others. In 2017, Grey and colleagues contacted four institutions where Sato or his co-authors had worked, and all four started investigations. In a new paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review, they describe some of what happened next:

Continue reading New study finds “important deficiencies” in university reports of misconduct

Journal to retract article from 2000 that plagiarized one from 1984

Image by Nick Youngson via Image Creator CC BY-SA 3.0

When it comes to plagiarism, there is apparently no statute of limitations.

That’s one lesson one might take from this tale of two papers, one published in 1984 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG), and the other published in 2000 in the Medical Journal of The Islamic Republic of Iran (MJIRI). Both are titled “The use of breast stimulation to prevent postdate pregnancy.”

Here’s the abstract of the AJOG article, written by two researchers at the Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco, California: Continue reading Journal to retract article from 2000 that plagiarized one from 1984

Why journal editors should dig deeper when authors ask for a retraction

Imagine you’re a journal editor. A group of authors sends you a request to retract one of their papers, saying that “during figure assembly certain images were inappropriately processed.”

What do you do next? Do you ask some tough questions about just what “inappropriately processed” means? Do you check your files for whether the author’s institution had told you about an investigation into the work? Do you Google the author’s names? Do you…search Retraction Watch?

It seems unlikely that any of those things happened in the case of a recent retraction from Nature Communications, or, if they did, they don’t seem to have informed the notice. We don’t know for sure, because, as is typical, the journal isn’t saying much. But here’s what we do know. Continue reading Why journal editors should dig deeper when authors ask for a retraction

Controversial pediatrics researcher has 20-year-old paper retracted for misconduct

A journal has retracted a paper on a drug for a blood disorder 20 years after it was published — and 17 years after an author of the article was told to request the move by his university.

The retraction is of a paper in Therapeutic Drug Monitoring by Gideon Koren and colleagues, then at the University of Toronto (U of T): Continue reading Controversial pediatrics researcher has 20-year-old paper retracted for misconduct

Found in translation: Authors blame language barriers after forging co-authors

When the merde hits the fan, blame the translator. That’s Rule 1 of botched international diplomacy — and, evidently, botched international science.

Otolaryngology researchers in China have lost their 2018 paper in the American Journal of Translational Research for what they’re calling (with some degree of chutzpah) language barriers.

The article, “Therapeutic ultrasound potentiates the anti-nociceptive and anti-inflammatory effects of curcumin to postoperative pain via Sirt1/NF-κB signaling pathway,” came from group whose primary affiliation was the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai. (It hasn’t been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.) However, the list of authors also included several scientists in Germany.

Evidently, the Germans were most unzufrieden.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Found in translation: Authors blame language barriers after forging co-authors

Do the humanities need a replication drive? A debate rages on

Rik Peels

Since last year, a half-dozen researchers have been having a debate: Should the humanities focus on replication? No, said Sarah de Rijcke and Bart Penders in Nature last August: “Resist calls for replicability in the humanities.” In the most recent piece on this subject, de Rijcke and Penders were joined by J. Britt Holbrook to again say “no.” Here, Rik Peels, Lex Bouter, and René van Woudenberg, who have been in the “yes” camp, respond. Continue reading Do the humanities need a replication drive? A debate rages on

Is it time for a new research integrity board in the U.S.?

C. K. Gunsalus

Nearly two years ago, a report from the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) called for a new advisory board that would promote research integrity and tackle misconduct. That board does not yet exist, but today in Nature, five authors, led by C. K. Gunsalus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, argue that it should, and describe next steps in its creation. We asked Gunsalus a few questions about the idea.

Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us what the research policy board would do. Who would fund it? Continue reading Is it time for a new research integrity board in the U.S.?

Carlo Croce loses a round in legal bid to be reinstated as dep’t chair

Carlo Croce

Carlo Croce, a professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus who has faced multiple investigations into misconduct allegations, has been denied a temporary restraining order that he sought in order to be reinstated as chair of his department.

Croce was forced to step down from the post last year. Magistrate Jennifer D. Hunt, of the Franklin County civil court, wrote in a January 23 decision that

third parties and the public interest will be harmed if a temporary restraining order is granted and Dr. Croce is reinstated as Chair.

Croce, OSU said Continue reading Carlo Croce loses a round in legal bid to be reinstated as dep’t chair