A researcher at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands has been fired for research fraud, and the university is retracting two papers, the Dutch press is reporting.
But don’t ask us who the employee was. That information is conspicuously absent from the medical center’s communications on the subject.
Here’s a press release from Leiden, in English via Google Translate: Continue reading Leiden University fires employee for research fraud, two retractions to follow
Diederik Stapel is up to 54 retractions.
Here’s the notice from Self and Identity: Continue reading Measure by measure: Diederik Stapel count rises again, to 54
In our work here at Retraction Watch, we’ve seen a number of euphemisms for plagiarism. (See slides 18-22 of this presentation for a selection.) Today, in following up on a case we covered last month, we’ve learned of a new way to avoid saying the dreaded p-word.
We reported in June that sex researcher Willibrord Weijmar Schultz had retracted two papers. One was for “substantial overlap between this paper and an earlier published paper by Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum,” while the other was for “breach of warranties made by the authors with respect to originality” and failure to cite a dissertation.
Two more retractions from Weijmar Schultz, for exactly the same reasons as the second one above, have just appeared. One was of a 1991 paper in Sexual and Marital Therapy (now Sexual and Relationship Therapy), while the other was of a 2003 article in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.
The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy notice reads as follows: Continue reading What’s the difference between plagiarism and “unintended and unknowing breach of copyright?”
The journal Memory has retracted a paper on repressed sexual abuse after a protracted dispute between the authors and an institutional investigation in The Netherlands that led to no findings of misconduct against the first author, Elke Geraerts — a rising star in the field of social psychology. (The title of hers TEDx talk, by the way, is “Resilience as a key to success.”)
The article, titled “Linking thought suppression and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse,” was published in 2008 and has been cited 10 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Bad Memory? Repressed sexual abuse memory paper retracted for data inconsistencies
Diederik Stapel, the former Tilburg University psychology professor who has retracted 53 papers because he made up the data, has settled with Dutch prosecutors, who began a criminal probe of his case last year.
Stapel will do 120 hours of community service, and decline disability and illness benefits that would have added up to 18 months’ worth of salary, according to reports in the Dutch press. Apparently, it helped his case that he had voluntarily given up his PhD.
A rough translation by a Retraction Watch reader: Continue reading Diederik Stapel settles with Dutch prosecutors, won’t face jail time
Yesterday we reported on the retraction for data misuse and plagiarism of a 21-year-old paper on sex and female cancer patients. Turns out we missed a couple of rather interesting details about the authors of the pulled article.
One tidbit, for example, is that one of them, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, is science royalty, having been a member of a team that won the 2000 Ig Nobel prize in medicine. Their heralded study, “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal,” published in 1999 in the BMJ: An inside-the-MRI look at the human body having sex. Continue reading Authors of retracted sex paper won Ig Nobel for MRI study of coitus — and had another retraction
Here’s one for the way-back machine.
The Annual Review of Sex Research (which is a supplement to the Journal of Sex Research) has retracted a 1992 paper by a group of researchers who lifted much of their analysis from two even older articles by another scholar. At 21 years post-publication, this is one of the oldest — but not the record-oldest — retractions we’ve covered to date.
The pulled paper, “Sexuality and cancer in women,” came from Willibrord C. M. Weijmar Schultz, Harry B. M. Van de Wiel, Daniela E. E. Hahn, and Mels F. Van Driel. (Weijmar Schultz and Van de Wiel are co-authors of this rather curious passage about the appropriateness of sexual contact between doctors and patients:
Continue reading 21-year-old article on the sex lives of women with cancer retracted for data misuse
Two more papers by Diederik Stapel — who was profiled by The New York Times Magazine this weekend — have been retracted, both in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The notice for “Hardly thinking about close and distant others: On cognitive business and target closeness in social comparison effects,” by Stapel and David Marx, and cited six times: Continue reading “Unfinished business”: Diederik Stapel retraction count rises to 53
Coding errors in a database maintained by Pfizer have led authors to retract two heart biomarker papers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The two notices, for “Prediction of cardiovascular events in statin-treated patients by lipid and non-lipid biomarkers” and “Plasma PCSK9 levels and clinical outcomes in the TNT (Treating to New Targets) Trial,” are highly detailed and say the same thing: Continue reading Pfizer database errors cause two voluminous retractions for JACC statin-biomarker papers
We’ve come across three notices in cardiology journals this week, so although they’re unrelated, we’re gathering them here.
Item 1, from Circulation Research: Continue reading Heart attack: Two cardiology retractions, plus a notice of duplication, in three different journals