Category: united states

ORI finds former North Carolina company lab tech faked data in NIH grant

advanced liquid logicThe Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned a former technician at a North Carolina technology firm after concluding that the researcher fabricated data while working on a project funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The researcher, Matthew Poore, was a technician at Advanced Liquid Logic when he committed the misconduct, according to the report. While at North Carolina State University prior to his job at Advanced Liquid Logic, Poore published, by our count, 11 papers, one of which was cited more than 50 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The ORI report does not mention any of them.

Here’s what it does say: Continue reading ORI finds former North Carolina company lab tech faked data in NIH grant

Two retractions appear for former Harvard dental researcher found to have committed misconduct

Martin
Martin Biosse-Duplan

Martin Biosse-Duplan, a former Harvard dental school research fellow found by the Office of Research Integrity to have falsified results has had the two papers in question retracted.

From the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research: Continue reading Two retractions appear for former Harvard dental researcher found to have committed misconduct

Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper

nature 43013
courtesy Nature

Nature is retracting a 2010 paper by a team from Princeton and Drexel on the workings of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria in people. How that came about seems to have been a winding road.

The article — a research letter — titled “Branched tricarboxylic acid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum,” came from the Princeton lab of Manuel Llinás. It purported to find that:

Continue reading Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper

Researcher found by ORI to have committed misconduct earns back right to apply for Federal grants

bois
Philippe Bois

A former researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in  Memphis has won back the right to apply for Federal research funding despite a 2011 finding against him by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Philippe Bois, a cancer researcher now working at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida, argued that the alleged misconduct in the ORI findings — which led to a three-year ban on applying for funding — was actually honest error. As Bois’s attorneys explained last year: Continue reading Researcher found by ORI to have committed misconduct earns back right to apply for Federal grants

“Conflicting investigations” prompt expression of concern in BMC Genomics

Source: Wikipedia
Ariel Fernandez, source: Wikipedia

BMC Genomics has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper by a prominent Argentine chemist, Ariel Fernandez, whose work covers several disciplines — “His research spans representation theory in algebra, physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, and more recently, molecular evolution and drug discovery” — and institutions. And therein lies the tale.

Fernandez appeared as the first author of the article, titled “Subfunctionalization reduces the fitness cost of gene duplication in humans by buffering dosage imbalances,” along with a pair of researchers from Taiwan. Fernandez’s affiliations were listed as being with the Instituto Argentino de Matemática “Alberto P. Calderón”, CONICET (National Research Council of Argentina), in Buenos Aires, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the Morgridge Institute for Research, in Madison, Wisc.

According to the abstract:

Continue reading “Conflicting investigations” prompt expression of concern in BMC Genomics

University of Virginia doctoral candidate plagiarizes in business ethics journal, but remains in program

j business ethicsWe’ve already reported on the retraction of a paper in a business ethics journal for plagiarism. Yes, plagiarism in an ethics journal. But it turns out there’s at least one more case of exactly the same thing, albeit in a different business ethics journal.

Here’s the notice from the Journal of Business Ethics: Continue reading University of Virginia doctoral candidate plagiarizes in business ethics journal, but remains in program

Calibration error sends moisture paper down the drain

wrrcoverScientific experiments are like recipes: With the right components and the proper steps, the end result can be a thing of beauty. But if you start with a cup of salt instead of a cup of flour, well, even the neighbor’s schnauzer won’t touch that batch of sugar cookies.

That’s a little like the situation we have in “Controls on topographic dependence and temporal instability in catchment-scale soil moisture patterns,” a paper published in February in Water Resources Research by Michael Coleman and Jeffrey Niemann of Colorado State University.

According to the notice:

Continue reading Calibration error sends moisture paper down the drain

Retraction appears for former Case Western dermatology researcher found by ORI to have falsified data

mol cell coverBryan William Doreian, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have falsified data in his Case Western dissertation, has retracted a 2009 paper in Molecular Biology of the Cell also cited by the ORI.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Retraction appears for former Case Western dermatology researcher found by ORI to have falsified data

Pfizer database errors cause two voluminous retractions for JACC statin-biomarker papers

Jacc1212coverCoding 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

Two more Eric Smart retractions appear

Eric J. Smart, via U Kentucky
Eric J. Smart, via U Kentucky

Eric Smart, the former University of Kentucky researcher found by the Office of Research Integrity to have faked images in ten papers, has two more retractions, both in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology.

Here’s one, for a paper cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Two more Eric Smart retractions appear