Category: united states

One plagiarized economics paper that won’t need to be retracted

s and bLate last year, we covered a paper wondering why there were so few retractions in business and economics journals. That post was on our minds as we read a fantastic piece of reporting by reporters at the Scarlet & Black, the Grinnell College student paper.

The story concerns Brian Swart, a Grinnell economics professor who “abruptly resigned in the middle of last semester,” reporters Peter Sullivan and Hayes Gardner note. As is unfortunately often the case, the university wouldn’t say why Swart was leaving. But Sullivan and Gardner didn’t leave it there. They talked to “professors from other institutions involved in the situation” and got the food of investigative reporters everywhere: Documents. Those interviews and documents showed that: Continue reading One plagiarized economics paper that won’t need to be retracted

Author retracts FASEB Journal paper for data reuse

fasebThe FASEB Journal has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), looking at the role of a tumor-suppressing micro-RNA in pulmonary fibrosis. The retraction suggests the provenance of the data are in question, and we learned details of what went wrong.

Here’s the notice, which, sadly, is behind a $12-per-day paywall: Continue reading Author retracts FASEB Journal paper for data reuse

First author of recently retracted paper has another corrected, in J Ag Food Chem

jafcau_v061i004.inddA paper that shares a first author with a paper retracted in December has been corrected.

Late last year, we reported on a retraction in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling (ARDS) by Indika Edirisinghe, who was at the University of Rochester when the original paper was published, and colleagues. On January 17, the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry published a correction to “Effect of Black Currant Anthocyanins on the Activation of Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (eNOS) in Vitro in Human Endothelial Cells,” on which Edirisinghe is also first author.

His affiliation on that paper, originally published in July 2011, is the Illinois Institute of Technology. Here’s the correction: Continue reading First author of recently retracted paper has another corrected, in J Ag Food Chem

ORI says Case Western skin scientist falsified data

molbiolcelldoreianThe U.S. Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned Bryan William Doreian, a former postdoc in dermatology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, for falsifying data in his dissertation and a 2009 paper in Molecular Biology of the Cell (for which it provided a cover image, at right).

ORI says Doreian’s bad NIH-funded data also appeared in a manuscript submitted to, but never published in, Nature Medicine.

Here are the papers cited in the finding: Continue reading ORI says Case Western skin scientist falsified data

Has “double-dipping” cost U.S. science funding agencies tens of millions of dollars?

Photo by Peyri via Flickr
Photo by Peyri via Flickr

Last year, an audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found “a potential for unnecessary duplication” among the billions of dollars in research grants funded by national agencies. Some researchers, it seemed, could be winning more than one grant to do the same research.

Prompted by that report, Virginia Tech’s Skip Garner and his colleagues used eTBLAST, which Garner invented, to review more than 630,000 grant applications submitted to the NIH, NSF, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, “the largest charitable funder of breast cancer research in the United States.” The approach was not unlike those by publishers to identify potential article duplications.

In a Comment published today in Nature, they report that they found 1,300 applications above a “similarity score” cutoff of 0.8 for federal agencies, and 0.65 for Komen documents — “with 1 indicating identical text in two same-length documents, and more than 1 representing identical text in one piece that is longer than the other.”

When they manually reviewed those 1,300: Continue reading Has “double-dipping” cost U.S. science funding agencies tens of millions of dollars?

Study finds many authors aren’t sharing data when they publish — and leads to a PLOS ONE retraction

clinical chemistryA new study in Clinical Chemistry paints an alarming picture of how often scientists deposit data that they’re supposed to — but perhaps not surprisingly, papers whose authors did submit such data scored higher on a quality scale than those whose authors didn’t deposit their data.

Ken Witwer, a pathobiologist at Hopkins, was concerned that a lot of studies involving microarray-based microRNA (miRNA) weren’t complying with Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) standards supposedly required by journals. So he looked at 127 such papers published between July 2011 and April 2012 in journals including PLOS ONE, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Blood, and Clinical Chemistry, assigning each one a quality score and checking whether the authors had followed guidelines.

What he uncovered wasn’t pretty — and has already led to a retraction. From the abstract: Continue reading Study finds many authors aren’t sharing data when they publish — and leads to a PLOS ONE retraction

University of Wisconsin neuroscientist faked data in two papers: ORI

adibhatla
Rao Adibhatla, via University of Wisconsin

A University of Wisconsin neuroscience researcher falsified “Western blot images as well as quantitative and statistical data” in two NIH-supported papers and three unfunded grant applications, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found.

As first reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and then The Scientist, Rao M. Adibhatla has agreed to retract the two papers, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Brain Research: Continue reading University of Wisconsin neuroscientist faked data in two papers: ORI

Plague paper partially retracted

iandi213coverPartial retractions — as opposed corrections or the full monty —  are unusual events in scientific publishing. But they appear to come in twos.

The journal Infection and Immunity, the work of whose editor, Ferric Fang, is much admired by this blog, has a fascinating example of the breed in its February issue.

The article in question, by a group from the University of Kentucky in Lexington led by Susan Straley, appeared online in 2007. It was titled “yadBC of Yersinia pestis, a New Virulence Determinant for Bubonic Plague,” and, as the words suggest, involved a gene marker for the virulence of plague. Or so it initially seemed.

But according to the partial retraction, the researchers are walking back one of their main claims. Consider: Continue reading Plague paper partially retracted

Lance Armstrong in the scientific literature: Questions abound

lanceinlab
Lance Armstrong in a UT lab

We’ve had plenty of big stories here at Retraction Watch this week, but even we must admit that the world’s biggest retractions — by press attention, anyway — have been in sports: Lance Armstrong (thanks, Oprah!) and Manti Te’o (thanks, Deadspin!).

We don’t have anything to add to the Te’o story, but a reader reminded us that there was a 2005 paper about Armstrong in the Journal of Applied Physiology that was vigorously questioned in the years following. Here’s the abstract of “Improved muscular efficiency displayed as Tour de France champion matures:” Continue reading Lance Armstrong in the scientific literature: Questions abound

Look ma, no guidelines! Paper on unpublished fetal surgery recommendations retracted

clinperinatcoverClinics in Perinatology has a rather intriguing retraction.

The paper in question was a June 2012 review by a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco’s division of pediatric surgery, titled “Maternal-Fetal Surgery:  History and General Considerations.”

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Look ma, no guidelines! Paper on unpublished fetal surgery recommendations retracted