A paper by Ping Dong, a former researcher at Northwestern who left her post less than a year after having a paper retracted from Psychological Science, has been subjected to an expression of concern.
Carlo Croce, the embattled and litigious cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, may be on the market for a new attorney.
Croce, who unsuccessfully sued the New York Times for libel after the newspaper reported on misconduct allegations against him, has been waging a second legal front against his institution. The grounds: Croce wants Ohio State to restore him to his position as chair of the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics — a demand OSU has so far rejected.
Court documents suggest that the case has proceeded to depositions. But we’ve learned that Croce’s attorneys in the academic matter have dropped him as a client. In a motion approved earlier this month, the lawyers, from the Columbus firm James E. Arnold & Associates, petitioned to be removed from the case.
A scientist for the U.S. government has lost a 2017 paper on spawning in catfish for problems with the data.
The paper, “Effective dose of salmon GnRHa for induction of ovulation in channel catfish,” was written by Nagaraj G. Chatakondi and appeared in the North American Journal of Aquaculture. Chatakondi is a geneticist with the Stoneville, Miss., office of the Agricultural Research Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
As we’ve noted before, “the wheels of scientific publishing turn slowly … but they do (sometimes) turn.”
More than six years after the first retraction for Erin Potts-Kant, who was part of a group at Duke whose work would unravel amid misconduct allegations and lead to a $112.5 million settlement earlier this year with the U.S. government — and two years after a journal says it first became aware of the issues — a retraction by the group has appeared in Pediatric Research, a Springer Nature title.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Intra-amniotic LPS amplifies hyperoxia-induced airway hyperreactivity in neonatal rats”:
Earlier this year, Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany at the State University of New York, asked journals to look into potentially problematic data in five papers — including one on which he had been a co-author.
As we reported in July, Pickett’s request came after he’d received an anonymous email pointing out issues with the data — concerns ranging from “Anomalies in standard errors, coefficients, and p-values” to “Unlikely survey design and data structure.”
At the time, one of the five articles had already received a correction for a “coding error” that changed the results. Pickett requested that the journal retract the paper entirely, but was rebuffed.
Now, two other journals have taken action on the articles on the list.
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has retracted three papers by a group from the University of California, Los Angeles, citing problems with the figures.
Two of the papers, published in 2002, 2004 and 2009, have the same last author, Mark H. Doolittle, who is the first author of the most recent article. Doolittle, who appears to be a highly talented woodworker, has left UCLA and did not respond to a request for comment.
The retraction notice for the 2002 paper, “Maturation of lipoprotein lipase in the endoplasmic reticulum: Concurrent formation of functional dimers and inactive aggregates,” states:
The University of Kentucky has started termination proceedings against a pair of scientists found guilty of “significant departures from accepted practices of research,” according to the institution.
The scientists, Xianglin Shi, who up until now had held the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and served as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine, and Zhuo Zhang in the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology in the College of Medicine, have lost access to their laboratories, which are shuttered, and other university equipment, UK said in a statement. A third researcher, Donghern Kim, who worked under Zhang, already has been fired in the scandal.
In October, the university told us that it was aware of the retractions but “not able to provide more information at this time.” The ongoing investigation was first reported in April by the Lexington Herald-Leader.
According to the UK’s announcement today, the inquiry, which began in June 2018, into Shi, Zhang and Kim found that:
Carlo Croce, a prolific cancer researcher at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus who was the subject of a 2017 front page story in The New York Times about allegations of misconduct against him, has lost a libel suit that he filed against the newspaper.
On Sunday, May 5 of this year, Justin Pickett received an email from a “John Smith” with the subject line “Data irregularities and request for data.”
“There seem to be irregularities in the data and findings in five articles that you published together with two surveys,” the anonymous correspondent wrote. “This document outlines those irregularities.”
Pickett was a co-author on only one of the papers, “Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment,” which was published in 2011 — the year he earned his PhD from Florida State University (FSU) — in the journal Criminology. The other four papers were published from 2015 to 2019 in Criminology, Law & Society Review, and Social Problems. The only author common to all four was Eric A. Stewart, a professor at FSU.
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has retracted two papers by a Georgia State University researcher, as well as flagged eight more with expressions of concern, a move the scientist called “unfair and unjustified.”
Ming-Hui Zou, the common author on all ten papers — as well as on twomore that have been corrected by the same journal — is, according to Georgia State,
an internationally recognized researcher in molecular and translational medicine and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular Medicine and associate vice president for research at Georgia State University…
Here’s the retraction notice for “Reactive nitrogen species is required for the activation of the AMP-activated protein kinase by statin in vivo,” published in 2008 Zou as the last author:
