A professor of interventional radiology in France pointed the finger at an alleged ghostwriter after he was caught plagiarizing large portions of text in a review article, Retraction Watch has learned.
“After careful checking, I noticed that I am not the author of this paper despite my first authorship since it has been written by our previous medical writter [sic],” Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch.
Loffroy also toned down the offense, saying he wouldn’t care if others had plagiarized his work.
It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.
A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images.
Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020.
A prominent physician-scientist in South Korea may soon be facing his fourth retraction. Last month, Hui-Nam Pak of Yonsei University was found guilty of duplicate publication, a form of academic misconduct, according to a report from the school’s committee on research integrity Retraction Watch has obtained.
Pak, a cardiologist, has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer. As we reported in February, journals pulled two of his papers the previous month after a whistleblower pointed out problems with the articles. One was retracted for “a number of issues related to scientific misconduct,” while the other was a duplicate publication. A third paper by Pak was retracted years earlier after mistakenly being published twice by the same journal.
Our February story triggered a flood of comments, many of them malicious. Some likened whistleblowing to “academic vandalism.” Others asserted that “whistleblowers deserve strong legal penalties” and that “immoral whistleblowers” seemed bent on ruining Pak’s “outstanding career.” Many comments were rejected for not adhering to our commenting policies, in particular making unsubstantiated claims.
The September 12 report from Yonsei University (in Korean) explains that an “informant” reported two of Pak’s papers to the school’s Research Ethics Integrity Committee on March 7.
For the past eight years, an education researcher in Spain has been waging an unsuccessful battle – including legal action – to quash a retraction she argues should never have happened.
Her paper, about the use of digital tools in early childhood education, was pulled by Computers & Education just months after it was published in 2015. According to the retraction notice, the article was submitted for publication while it was still under review at another journal, violating editorial policies against duplicate submission.
But according to the researcher, Elena Ramírez Orellana of the University of Salamanca, her paper had already been rejected by the first journal before it was sent to the other. She had the documents to prove it, she said, but that didn’t matter.
Two institutional investigations that concluded in 2016 and 2019 found scientific misconduct in multiple publications from the lab of a leading urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Retraction Watch has learned.
The investigations could not determine who had manipulated the published images of experimental data, but the 2019 report concluded that Rajvir Dahiya, also director of the urology research center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “was senior/last author on all these publications and therefore responsible for the results.” Dahiya retired in 2020.
The two investigation reports, which we obtained through a public records request, along with the reports from the preliminary inquiries preceding the investigations, recommend notifying the journals that published eight papers of the issues identified. Four have so far been retracted, one corrected, and two marked with expressions of concern. One of those expressions of concern was published last month.
In comments to Retraction Watch, Dahiya blamed the findings that research misconduct occurred in his lab on the age of the papers. He said the VA destroyed notebooks with original data that had been stored in a central facility after the required data retention period had lapsed:
One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.
The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.
The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists.
In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.
Following an inspection earlier this month, Colombia’s FDA has suspended all human research at a facility that until this summer had been receiving U.S. funding to develop a malaria vaccine.
The Malaria Vaccine and Development Center, in the city of Cali in western Colombia, is part of the Caucaseco Scientific Research Consortium, which is run by husband-and-wife team Myriam Arévalo-Herrera and Sócrates Herrera. The couple has secured more than $17 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2003.
As we reported in April, an investigation by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exposed a host of serious problems at the facilities, including widespread animal abuse and falsified research approvals. The NIH defunded the facilities in June, as first reported by STAT.
According to a statement released on August 5 (in Spanish), the Colombian National Institute of Drug and Food Surveillance (Invima) made the following findings during its inspection of the Malaria Vaccine and Development Center:
The president of Aizu University in Japan has resigned after two investigations found he had self-plagiarized or double-submitted a dozen papers.
Toshiaki Miyazaki was also found to have “filed an application for a project subsidized by the national government without going through the university official procedures,” which “caused confusion,” according to Aizu. He resigned effective today [July 31].
The move comes more than a year after the first investigation, as we reported, which concluded in February 2022 and found that Miyazaki had self-plagiarized four papers. At that time, he had to forfeit 20% of one month’s salary.
A month later, according to a report issued last week by the university, Miyazaki “self-reported that there were 12 papers suspected of self-plagiarism.” A preliminary investigation then began, with a full investigation starting in April and lasting until February of this year.
The journal BMC Public Health plans to retract an article that found smoking rates fell faster than expected in the US as use of e-cigarettes increased, Retraction Watch has learned.
The authors contend that they addressed the issues cited in the retraction notice during the peer review process and say they addressed them even more extensively when the journal said they intended to retract.
Some journals, including several in the BMJ family and the American Journal of Public Health, will not publish research funded by the tobacco industry, which has led to at least one retraction. But the planned BMC Public Health retraction notice does not refer to that conflict of interest.
