A paper looking at the use of transcendental meditation to reduce the risk of heart disease, and that was put on hold just 12 minutes before its scheduled publication time, is still under review a year later.
On June 29 of last year, we brought you the news of the highly unusual — if not unprecedented — occurrence at the Archives of Internal Medicine. As we wrote then: Continue reading One year later, transcendental meditation study yanked minutes before publication still under review
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found that a neuroscientist who studied the effects of pesticides on a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease made up data.
As The Scientist reported on Friday, the ORI found that Mona Thiruchelvam faked cell counts in two grant applications and a number of papers that claimed to show how the pesticides paraquat, maneb, and atrazine might affect parts of the brain involved in Parkinson’s. The Scientist notes: Continue reading ORI finds Parkinson’s-pesticides researcher guilty of faking data; two papers to be retracted
A Japanese web site is reporting that Yoshitaka Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist suspected of widespread data fabrication, did indeed fake his results in at least 172 published studies.
According to the article, on a site called Jiji Press: Continue reading Report: Fujii faked data in at least 172 papers
On May 8, PLoS Medicine published a paper by Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid of Stanford University, about “whether development assistance for health provided to developing country governments increases health expenditures.”
That paper caught the eye of the Center for Global Development’s David Roodman. He began a May 14 blog post about the study, “The Health Aid Fungibility Debate: Don’t Believe Either Side,” as follows: Continue reading Authors retract PLoS Medicine foreign health aid paper that had criticized earlier Lancet study
Two more papers from Dutch fraudster Diederik Stapel have been retracted. Both appeared in the journal Psychological Science in 2008, with the same, evidently unwitting co-author, Kirsten Ruys, of Tilburg University.
Here is the notice: Continue reading Withdraw that emotion: Psych journal retracts two Stapel papers on mood
The body count has reached three for a group of German tissue engineers who appear to have cloned their data in many of their publications.
Tissue Engineering Part A has retracted one of the papers from the investigators, titled “Clinically established hemostatic scaffold (tissue fleece) as biomatrix in tissue- and organ-engineering research,” which was published in 2003.
The notice states: Continue reading Reverse tissue engineering: data reuse causes retractions of three papers from German organ researchers
Back in April, a group of French and Tunisian researchers published a paper in Biomaterials which came to the astonishing conclusion that buckyballs (carbon tetrachloride) coated in olive oil could dramatically extend the lives of lab rodents. That news was picked up by Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, on which he expressed some bemusement about the work but ultimately praised it:
These are reasonable (but unproven) hypotheses, and I very much look forward to seeing this work followed up to see some more light shed on them. The whole life-extension result needs to be confirmed as well, and in other species. I congratulate the authors of this work, though, for giving me the most number of raised eyebrows I’ve had while reading a scientific paper in quite some time.
One of those eyebrows dropped a bit the following day, when Lowe reported that readers had pointed him to a clear case of image duplication in the article. At the time, Lowe concluded: Continue reading Controversial paper on life-extending buckyballs corrected after blog readers note problems
Caution: Sexual innuendo ahead.
The withdrawal method is a notoriously unreliable form of birth control. It seems that what happens between the sheets applies to paper as well as cotton.
Here’s a retraction notice from BMC Research Notes that speaks — and nudges and winks — for itself. The 2011 article, “Effect of controlled and uncontrolled cooling rate on motility parameters of cryopreserved ram spermatozoa,” by a team of Irani veterinary scientists: Continue reading Wham, bam, no thank you, ram: Publisher error leads to retraction of already-withdrawn sheep sperm paper
In the beginning, there was Scott Reuben.
Well, not quite. Reuben, a Massachusetts anesthesiologist who fabricated data and briefly topped our list of most-retracted authors, didn’t invent research fraud, although he did spend six months in federal prison for his crimes. But his case was in no small measure responsible for the birth of this blog, and, well, the rest of human history that followed.
Although Reuben’s retractions are behind him now — his count ends at 22 — and other scientists, including two anesthesiologists, Joachim Boldt and Yoshitaka Fujii, have or likely soon will dramatically eclipsed his mark, a new paper has revisited his publications with an eye toward seeing if they could identify statistical evidence of data manipulation. It’s the same kind of effort that Ed Yong highlighted as noteworthy about the Dirk Smeesters case, which we covered yesterday and which involved an anonymous statistically inclined whistleblower.
Before we get to whether there was evidence of such manipulation Continue reading Is post-hoc statistical analysis the new fraud detection tool? A new review looks at fraudster Reuben’s work
Sebastian Schuchmann, a neuroscience researcher whose duplication errors led to a Cell correction last year, has retracted a 12-year-old paper in the Journal of Neurochemistry whose figures were copied from two of his earlier papers.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Author whose duplications forced Cell correction retracts paper on Down syndrome