Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica has retracted a 2008 paper by a group of Estonian researchers who appear to have wound up in legal jeopardy for misrepresenting their work.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Anesthesia journal retracts paper from Estonian researchers in wake of legal inquiry
It has been a while since we heard about Joachim Boldt, the German anesthesiologist whose 90-odd retractions briefly put him at the top of the heap until Yoshitaka Fujii kicked him off earlier this year.
Now, Boldt’s former institution, the Klinikum Ludwigshafen, has released a report on its investigation into the disgraced critical care expert, and the results aren’t pretty. Here’s a press release about the report, in its entirety: Continue reading Boldt inquiry concludes: False findings in at least 10 studies, but no harm to patients
The American Journal of the Medical Sciences has retracted a 2012 article on premature heartbeats by a group of authors in Missouri who took “significant” liberties with an earlier paper in Heart.
The offending paper, “Ventricular ectopic beats: an overview of management considerations, “was written by Amar Jadhav and colleagues at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, in Columbia, and published in the February issue of the AJMS.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Mizzou investigating faculty as one heart beats as two in plagiarized — and now retracted — cardiac paper
The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology has issued an “expression of concern” for a 2003 review article, based on a previous lecture, with close echoes to a paper that had appeared in one of The Lancet titles.
Here’s the notice for the article, by Peter Winstanley, dean of the Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom: Continue reading Pharmacology journal expresses concern over “similar, but updated” review
We have long (well, for the past two years) wondered about the pitfalls of publishing in one’s own journal, and here’s a case that illustrates precisely how fraught that practice can be.
The journal Microfluidics and Nanofluidics has retracted a 2010 article, titled “Induced-charge electrokinetic phenomena,” by Dongqing Li and Yasaman Daghighi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, for what appears to be extensive misappropriation of text and data.
As the notice explains: Continue reading Plagiarism costs Canadian lab-on-a-chip researcher a paper — in his own journal
A team of what you might call daredevil researchers has lost a paper about a sport called cable wakeboarding after they tried to publish, in English, a very similar version of what they’d published in German.
We have a confession to make: Before sitting down to write this post, we had no idea what cable wakeboarding was. So before we discuss the retraction, here’s a definition, courtesy of CableWakeboarding.com:
Cable wakeboarding is simply wakeboarding while being pulled not by a boat, but by an overhead cableski system. It’s definitely the coolest addition to the distinguished list of extreme sports throughout the world, because it combines the best of the extreme nature of wakeboarding without the need for (or expense of) a boat. Cable is an enormously valuable and important element of the entire sport of wakeboarding.
Now to the retraction notice for “Cable wakeboarding, a new trendy sport: analysis of injuries with regard to injury prevention,” published online in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports online in 2010: Continue reading Oh, snap: Cable wakeboarding injury paper falls to duplication
We’ve been covering the case of Alirio Melendez, three of whose papers have been retracted amidst questions about almost 70 studies. The latest development is a correction in the Journal of Cellular Physiology, which has already retracted one of his papers, of a study on which he was a co-author.
Here’s the correction for “Short dysfunctional telomeres impair the repair of arsenite-induced oxidative damage in mouse cells”: Continue reading A correction for Alirio Melendez, in Journal of Cellular Physiology
The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM) has issued an Expression of Concern about a paper published online earlier this year, after concerns about the data prompted an investigation by the University of Nebraska.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading University of Nebraska investigating work of lung researchers as journal issues Expression of Concern
The Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B: Applied Biomaterials is retracting a 2010 paper by Turkish dental researchers for “unattributed overlap.”
We’re pretty sure that’s a euphemism for plagiarism we haven’t heard before — and it raises the question, could you have acceptable, attributed overlap?
The study has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including by the retraction notice: Continue reading Dental paper pulled for “unattributed overlap”
Last December, we reported on a Journal of Immunology paper that was retracted after a Cardiff University investigation found the senior author had inappropriately manipulated images. The inquiry found that there had been “no intention to mislead and subsequent repeats of the original experiments have shown that the paper’s conclusions remain sound,” the university told us at that time.
The senior author of the paper, Rossen Donev, had since moved on to the University of Swansea, and Cardiff had notified the Medical Research Council, which funded the work. The case seemed to end there.
But other work by Donev’s former lab group, which is led by BP Morgan, the dean of Cardiff’s medical school, has been the subject of scrutiny by at least one anonymous whistleblower. That whistleblower’s allegations — which also center on image manipulation — have been reported on the relatively new site Science Fraud, which posts allegations anonymously. They involve papers published in Cancer Research, Molecular Immunology, and the American Journal of Physiology.
We’ve now learned that Cardiff has “initiated its Procedure for Dealing with Allegations of Academic Misconduct in Research” after Clare Francis, another anonymous whistleblower whose name will probably be familiar to Retraction Watch readers, forwarded the concerns to university officials. Now, according to an email from Carole A Evans, Cardiff’s Director of Governance and Compliance Division: Continue reading Cardiff University looking into allegations of misconduct by group headed by its dean of medicine