A scientist for the U.S. government has lost a 2017 paper on spawning in catfish for problems with the data.
The paper, “Effective dose of salmon GnRHa for induction of ovulation in channel catfish,” was written by Nagaraj G. Chatakondi and appeared in the North American Journal of Aquaculture. Chatakondi is a geneticist with the Stoneville, Miss., office of the Agricultural Research Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist.
As its title would indicate, the article, “Anti-angiogenic effect of Interleukin-26 in oxygen-induced retinopathy mice via inhibiting NFATc1-VEGF pathway,” by a team from Jinhua Municipal Central Hospital in Zhejiang, purported to show that IL-26 could prevent the growth of new blood vessels in mice with damaged retinas.
As we’ve noted before, “the wheels of scientific publishing turn slowly … but they do (sometimes) turn.”
More than six years after the first retraction for Erin Potts-Kant, who was part of a group at Duke whose work would unravel amid misconduct allegations and lead to a $112.5 million settlement earlier this year with the U.S. government — and two years after a journal says it first became aware of the issues — a retraction by the group has appeared in Pediatric Research, a Springer Nature title.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Intra-amniotic LPS amplifies hyperoxia-induced airway hyperreactivity in neonatal rats”:
Following weeks of scrutiny, the daughter of a high-profile official in South Korea has had a paper she wrote as a high school student retracted, in part because the journal determined she had made no intellectual contributions to the study.
Cho Kuk, who was officially appointed yesterday (September 9) as the top justice official in South Korea, is embroiled in a controversy over undeserved academic advantages his daughter, Cho Min, obtained.
According to a story by Reuters about the larger controversy last week:
Earlier this year, Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany at the State University of New York, asked journals to look into potentially problematic data in five papers — including one on which he had been a co-author.
As we reported in July, Pickett’s request came after he’d received an anonymous email pointing out issues with the data — concerns ranging from “Anomalies in standard errors, coefficients, and p-values” to “Unlikely survey design and data structure.”
At the time, one of the five articles had already received a correction for a “coding error” that changed the results. Pickett requested that the journal retract the paper entirely, but was rebuffed.
Now, two other journals have taken action on the articles on the list.
Is it possible for just one researcher to perform a clinical trial of more than 200 participants?
According to the editorial board of the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, an Elsevier title, the answer would seem to be no. The journal has decided to retract a 2016 paper in which the author claimed to have conducted such a large trial on their own.
Here’s the notice for “Calcium versus oral contraceptive pills containing drospirenone for the treatment of mild to moderate premenstrual syndrome: A double blind randomized placebo controlled trial:”
A chemical engineer in China who claims his supporting data were wiped out in a flood has notched his ninth retraction, seven from a single journal, for suspicious images and related issues.
The work of Dong Ge Tong, of Chengdu University of Technology, had come under scrutiny in PubPeer, and several of his articles received expressions of concern before ultimately falling to retraction.
Last week, the Journal of Materials Chemistry A pulled seven papers on which Tong was an author. Here’s the notice for one of those articles, “Hollow amorphous NaFePO4 nanospheres as a high-capacity and high-rate cathode for sodium-ion batteries,” first published in 2015:
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has retracted three papers by a group from the University of California, Los Angeles, citing problems with the figures.
Two of the papers, published in 2002, 2004 and 2009, have the same last author, Mark H. Doolittle, who is the first author of the most recent article. Doolittle, who appears to be a highly talented woodworker, has left UCLA and did not respond to a request for comment.
The retraction notice for the 2002 paper, “Maturation of lipoprotein lipase in the endoplasmic reticulum: Concurrent formation of functional dimers and inactive aggregates,” states:
A researcher in India is up to five retractions, by our count, for problematic data and image issues.
The latest retractions involve articles published in 2008 and 2013 in the journal Life Sciences. The last author on the papers is Yogeshwer Shukla, of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, about whom we have previously written.
The first paper, “Resveratrol induces apoptosis involving mitochondrial pathways in mouse skin tumorigenesis,” is rife with image problems:
The University of Kentucky has started termination proceedings against a pair of scientists found guilty of “significant departures from accepted practices of research,” according to the institution.
The scientists, Xianglin Shi, who up until now had held the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and served as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine, and Zhuo Zhang in the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology in the College of Medicine, have lost access to their laboratories, which are shuttered, and other university equipment, UK said in a statement. A third researcher, Donghern Kim, who worked under Zhang, already has been fired in the scandal.
In October, the university told us that it was aware of the retractions but “not able to provide more information at this time.” The ongoing investigation was first reported in April by the Lexington Herald-Leader.
According to the UK’s announcement today, the inquiry, which began in June 2018, into Shi, Zhang and Kim found that:
