An appeals court has affirmed the stiff prison sentence for Dong-Pyou Han, the former Iowa State University researcher who faked the results of an HIV vaccine experiment in rabbits. Continue reading Court denies appeal of HIV fraudster’s 57-month prison sentence
Category: united states
Data dispute forces journal to pull paper about rare bird on valuable land
The authors of a paper about the density of an endangered bird on valuable Texas lands are disputing the journal’s decision to pull the paper after other scientists objected to some of its contents.
The paper, published online in August by the Journal of Field Ornithology, compared different models for estimating the number of golden-cheeked warblers that nest in Texas. According to the Austin American-Statesman, some of that land includes highly sought-after woodlands. Developers had used estimates from recent years, which suggested that the bird population was in relatively good health, to petition to open that land for real estate development. But the new paper concluded that those estimates were too high.
After some scientists who produced the more rosy estimates claimed that the some of their data had been included in the newest paper without permission, the editor in chief decided to retract it.
That was in November. There’s no retraction note for “Density influences accuracy of model-based estimates for a forest songbird.” We contacted the editor in chief, Gary Ritchison, to ask why. He told us,
Continue reading Data dispute forces journal to pull paper about rare bird on valuable land
Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding
The National Science Foundation will no longer fund a pair of chemists who “recklessly falsified data,” according to a report from the NSF’s Office of Inspector General, unless they “take specific actions to address issues” in a 2004 Science paper.
That paper is going to be retracted as soon as possible, Science told us. The co-authors that the NSF reprimanded are Bruce Eaton and Dan Feldheim, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder; they have been under scrutiny since 2008, when an investigation at North Carolina State University, their former employer, found that the Science paper contained falsified data.
The paper, “RNA-Mediated Metal-Metal Bond Formation in the Synthesis of Hexagonal Palladium Nanoparticles,” has been cited 138 times.
Science Editor in Chief Marcia McNutt told us today that a retraction is in the works:
Continue reading Science retracting paper by chemists cut off from NSF funding
Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper
Authors are retracting a 2012 paper on cholesterol metabolism in zebrafish after realizing it included a case of mistaken identity in a DNA sequence crucial to some aspects of the experiment.
A postdoc misidentified the plasmid in question after failing to fully sequence it before including it in the experiment. A technician in the lab found the mistake, last author Steven Farber, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Maryland, explained:
When the omitted region was correctly sequenced we discovered it had an error.
He told us in a phone interview what that felt like:
We were like, holy crap.
Next came months of back and forth with the journal, discussing whether to correct or retract the paper. Farber tells us the mistake, which affects two figures,
was unfortunate. Most of the paper is in fact correct.
The paper, “Visualization of Lipid Metabolism in the Zebrafish Intestine Reveals a Relationship between NPC1L1-Mediated Cholesterol Uptake and Dietary Fatty Acid,” published in Chemistry & Biology, has been cited 21 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the detailed retraction note: Continue reading Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper
Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper
The corresponding author of a paper on testicular cancer is telling readers to discount a figure after she learned it may have been manipulated.
Although that one figure in the 2005 paper in the British Journal of Cancer may be problematic, the authors found data to support the other figures, and its conclusions.
This isn’t the first time first author Kerry Manton has faced questions over her data — in 2012, one of her papers was retracted following an investigation by her institution, the Queensland University of Technology. And in 2014, QUT repaid a $275,000 grant after finding Manton
failed to fulfill (her) responsibilities in relation to the responsible dissemination of research findings and that this, coupled with a failure to correct the errors, constituted research misconduct.
Here’s the corrigendum for “Hypermethylation of the 5′ CpG island of the gene encoding the serine protease Testisin promotes its loss in testicular tumorigenesis:”
Continue reading Suspicions of data manipulation lead to correction of testicular cancer paper
Prostate cancer paper retracted after investigation can’t review original image
An article about how a COX-2 inhibitor (celecoxib) inhibits growth of prostate cancer in rats is being retracted after the authors were unable to provide an investigation committee at New York University with the backup they were asking for.
When the paper was published in 2003, first author Bhagavathi Narayanan worked at the Institute for Cancer Prevention in New York (also known as the American Health Foundation). But when the institute went broke the next year — thanks partly to lavish salaries and offices, as the New York Post reported — the authors claim they could no longer obtain back up for an image in the paper, once it was questioned years later by NYU, where Narayanan is now based.
Here’s the retraction note, published in Clinical Cancer Research:
Continue reading Prostate cancer paper retracted after investigation can’t review original image
Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device
To climate scientist Pieter Tans, a “novel” air sampling device in a recent paper looked a little too familiar. Specifically, like a device that he had invented — the AirCore, which he calls a “tape recorder” for air.
The journal editors came up with a unique solution to the disagreement that followed, which the editor in chief called “rather unclear:” The journal ran an editorial in which both Tans and the authors of the paper contend that their device is unique.
The paper in question, “A novel Whole Air Sample Profiler (WASP) for the quantification of volatile organic compounds in the boundary layer,” was published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. It has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
It now bears a note, in bold and red: “Please read the Editorial Note before accessing the paper.”
Here’s how the editorial laid out the case:
Continue reading Inventors have a dust up over air sampling device
The Big (Retraction) Short: Securitized loans paper may get change of venue
A paper on the securitized loan industry’s pricing practices was pulled from the Journal of Finance, but may be appearing in another journal.
The Journal of Finance issued a notice of withdrawal, for “Who Facilitated Misreporting in Securitized Loans?” by John M. Griffin and Gonzalo Maturana, but does not say why it was taken out. Griffin’s web site notes that the paper is to be published in the Review of Financial Studies.
Here’s the note, dated Sept. 23: Continue reading The Big (Retraction) Short: Securitized loans paper may get change of venue
A bullshit excuse? My lab notebook “was blown into a manure pit”
A researcher who studies how to turn dairy cattle manure into natural gas falsified and fabricated data in a journal article and failed to declare a commercial conflict of interest, a Washington State University investigation has found.
The study “Evaluation of Co-Digestion at a Commercial Dairy Anaerobic Digester” was published in 2011 in the journal CLEAN: Soil, Air, Water. First author Craig Frear was a Ph.D. student at WSU Pullman when the study was carried out and an assistant professor at the time of the investigation. The editor-in-chief of CLEAN, Prisca Henheik, told us that the retraction is a done deal even though it has not been posted online: Continue reading A bullshit excuse? My lab notebook “was blown into a manure pit”
Nature retracts paper six years after it was flagged for fraud
Nature retracted a paper on protein structures today, six years after an investigation at the University of Alabama identified several structures that were “more likely than not falsified and/or fabricated” by one of the authors.
The paper came under scrutiny soon after it was published in 2006. A letter published in Nature that same year pointed out “physically implausible features in the structures it described.” That triggered the investigation at the University of Alabama, the result of which was published in 2009, identifying “nine publications related to the same protein structures that should be retracted from various scientific journals.” Everything was pinned on last author H.M. Krishna Murthy, who the investigation determined was “solely responsible for the fraudulent data.”
A 2009 Nature news article on the investigation declared that the “fraud is the largest ever in protein crystallography.”
We’re not sure what took Nature so long to retract the letter, titled “The structure of complement C3b provides insights into complement activation and regulation.” Here’s the note, which explains that not all the authors agreed to the retraction:
Continue reading Nature retracts paper six years after it was flagged for fraud