A former lecturer in the modern languages department of the University of St Andrews in Scotland committed plagiarism in seven papers published between 2014 and 2022, according to the results of an institutional investigation.
The university posted a statement on its website about the outcome of the investigation that did not name the researcher, who Retraction Watch has learned is Ros Holmes.
Holmes has two retractions in our database, both for plagiarism.
An anesthesiologist who had his funding revoked for fabricating data has earned a fourth retraction for publishing the same data in two Springer Nature journals.
A neurology researcher in Australia is no longer employed at his former university in the midst of a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. And the work of a co-author at another institution also is being assessed for possible research misconduct after sleuths alerted the university to comments on PubPeer about potential data issues in his papers.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, Gregory Konat, retracted the paper because several of the western blots appeared to be duplicated and he no longer had confidence in the results, according to the retraction notice. The six authors are researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Macquarie University and St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
Thirty randomized clinical trials involving a researcher in Egypt who has already had six papers retracted show signs of research misconduct and data fabrication, according to the authors of a recent preprint.
Ben Mol, one of the authors of the preprint and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Monash University in Australia, has spent several years investigating the work of Sherief Abd-Elsalam, a hepatologist and gastroenterologist at Tanta University in Egypt. Abd-Elsalam denies that his research is false or fabricated.
Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.
Ten years after a neuroscientist was fired from his job at a Veterans Administration Medical Center, he has won a challenge of the decision.
Wayne State University, where the researcher, Christian Kreipke, was studying traumatic brain injury, fired him in February 2012 following a research misconduct investigation that found he had faked data. At the time Kreipke had a dual appointment at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit.
Kreipke maintains that Wayne State investigated him in retaliation for asking questions about how the university administered grant funding. He filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired alleging that the university had committed grant fraud against the federal government, to the tune of $169 million. In 2014, a judge dismissed the case.
A researcher who used similar, related, or identical research to publish over 30 studies in various academic journals will have four more of those papers retracted, bringing his total to ten retractions, Retraction Watch has learned.
Hossein Mohammadhosseini was formerly listed as a researcher at the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Technology, Malaysia. His retracted papers all relate to a method to make more sustainable concrete by adding metalized plastic fibers, polypropylene fibers, and/or palm oil fuel ash.
Four of Mohammadhosseini’s studies are being retracted from the Journal of Cleaner Production. They are:
In 2018, a newly minted PhD made an uncomfortable discovery.
At a conference, he saw other researchers presenting the results of their attempt to replicate the work of one of his fellow students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who had found a relationship between heavy rainfall and the number of prisoners in Nigeria in the first half of the 20th century.
Tokyo’s Waseda University is investigating alleged misconduct by an assistant professor at the institution, Retraction Watch has learned.
The probe is focusing on at least three works by Woohyang Sim, of the Faculty of International Research and Education, including her 2020 doctoral dissertation, titled “What is Higher Education For? Educational Aspirations and Career Prospects of Women in the Arab Gulf.” Two of Sim’s published papers are also under scrutiny, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
In June 2022, an anonymous commenter on PubPeer flagged several problems with these publications, as well as with Sim’s master’s thesis and another one of her papers. That same month, a whistleblower notified the Japanese government about the concerns, according to the source.
A university in Japan has revoked the doctoral degree of a former student found to have manipulated images and graphs in a dissertation and two published papers.
“Although our university has been working to raise awareness of research ethics in order to prevent research misconduct, it is extremely regrettable that such a situation has occurred,” Tohoku University President Hideo Ohno said in an announcement made on March 30 (translated from the Japanese using Google Translate).
The school did not name the former student, who was first author on both papers. But details mentioned in its investigation report (in Japanese) point to a researcher called Nan Li. Li was also named on a blog in Japan that covered the case (in Japanese).
