Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist and admitted data fabricator — and owner of 54 retraction notices — is now teaching at a college in the town of Tilburg.
According to Omroep Brabant, Stapel was offered the job as a kind of adjunct at Fontys Academy for Creative Industries to teach social philosophy. The site quotes a Nick Welman explaining the rationale for hiring Stapel (per Google Translate): Continue reading Curtain up on second act for Dutch fraudster Stapel: College teacher
Three physicists at Imperial College London have retracted a paper on Coulomb collisions, a kind of fender bender between two charged particles, after realizing their equations were written wrong.
The mistake resulted in an erroneous conclusion about the strength of the collisions.
Here’s the notice for “Effects of Large-Angle Coulomb Collisions on Inertial Confinement Fusion Plasmas”: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Particle physicists pull paper after equation collides with the truth
Journal publishers can be agonizingly slow when it comes to officially retracting a paper.
Here’s a prime example of the consequences of that bureaucratic foot-dragging: Ten months after being told that Fazlurrahman Khan had fabricated his data, and two months after announcing two of Khan’s papers would be retracted from two of its journals, Elsevier still has not retracted either paper.
Worse, at least one of the papers, “Degradation of 2,4-dinitroanisole (DNAN) by metabolic cooperative activity of Pseudomonas sp. strain FK357 and Rhodococcus imtechensis strain RKJ300,” in the journal Chemosphere, has been cited since the announcement was made. In fact, the paper was published in Journal of Hazardous Materials, the Elsevier journal that is dragging its feet retracting another of Khan’s papers, “Aerobic degradation of 4-nitroaniline (4-NA) via novel degradation intermediates by Rhodococcus sp. strain FK48.”
Jim Spain, in whose lab Khan worked at Georgia Tech, reached out to us to express his concerns with this timeline: Continue reading Oops: Elsevier journal publishes paper citing paper it promised to retract two months ago
The authors of a 1997 paper on macular degeneration have lost the article after readers noticed uncanny similarities with a 1996 publication from several of the same authors.
The retracted article, “Radiation therapy for macular degeneration: Technical considerations and preliminary results,” appeared in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics — otherwise known as the “Red Journal.” The first author, Luther W. Brady, is a leading U.S. oncologist.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Double dipping on trial data topples 17-year-old macular degeneration article
An architecture professor at the University of Arizona has been sanctioned — lightly — for plagiarizing from the thesis of one of her masters’ students.
According to a report in the Arizona Daily Star, the professor, Susannah Dickinson: Continue reading Arizona prof plagiarizes student’s thesis, gets reprimanded, but keeps her job
The authors of a paper retracted for plagiarism of a popular website have decided not to take the charges — which they don’t contest — lying down.
Here’s the notice for “Alcohol consumption and hormonal alterations related to muscle hypertrophy: a review,” which appeared in Nutrition & Metabolism, a BioMed Central title: Continue reading Author of alcohol paper retracted for plagiarism defends copy-and-paste strategy
Although it shocks some observers every time, we’ve reported on the retractions of more than 100 papers pulled because authors managed to do their own peer review.
Apparently, it’s happened again.
Here’s a retraction notice in BMC Systems Biology for “Predicting new molecular targets for rhein using network pharmacology,” by Aihua Zhang, Hui Sun, Bo Yang and Xijun Wang:
Continue reading It’s happened again: Researcher appears to have peer reviewed his own paper
Molecular Vision has issued “full retractions” for a trio of articles by a group of eye researchers. All of the articles were led by Azza El-Remessy, director of the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy’s clinical and therapeutic graduate program.
As much as that is, there might be more still with this case.
The first paper, from 2000, was titled “Regulation of interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein (IRBP) gene expression by cAMP in differentiated retinoblastoma cell.” Its abstract states: Continue reading Molecular Vision retracts three papers from University of Georgia group with error-ridden images
The publisher Frontiers has issued a Statement of Concern about a paper denying that HIV causes AIDS, and has launched an investigation into how the paper was published in the first place.
The paper, “Questioning the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent,” is written by Patricia Goodson of Texas A&M University and was published on September 23 in Frontiers in Public Health. As Tara Smith, who blogged about the paper yesterday, notes: Continue reading Publisher issues statement of concern about HIV denial paper, launches investigation
This one is a little odd.
A cardiology paper from China has been retracted because “permission to report these discussions was not sought nor obtained,” though it’s unclear what “the discussions” refers to. The person to whom the discussions are attributed to in the retraction, Ji Bingyang, is not an author on the paper, and none of his papers are cited in the retracted article.
Here’s the notice in the Chinese Medical Journal for “A novel rat model of cardiopulmonary bypass for deep hypothermic circulatory arrest without blood priming”:
Continue reading Notice fails to get to the heart of cardiology retraction