Accusations of plagiarism spanning at least 14 years have finally caught up with Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who has had 13 papers retracted from a journal he had guest edited.
The dean of the for-profit University of Atlanta has been accused of copying his own and others’ work a number of times, as we wrote in November.
Here’s the notice from Neohelicon editor Péter Hajdu: Continue reading Serial plagiarist loses 13 papers
Georgia State University student newspaper The Signal pulled an article and dropped a writer after discovering he lied about talking to a school spokesperson and made up quotes.
The paper tells Retraction Watch that the undergraduate, Rico Johnson, has been removed from the staff of the paper.
Here’s the notice for “Georgia State planning renovation for new media production center”: Continue reading Georgia State student paper retracts article for faked quotes, fires writer
It took five months, but in December a second retraction popped up for disgraced accounting professor James E. Hunton.
Hunton resigned his teaching post at Bentley University in December of 2012. An extensive investigation by Bentley showed that not only was the data in two papers falsified. Hunton also lied about non-existent confidentiality agreements and tried to destroy evidence of his lies by unsuccessfully wiping his laptop and changing metadata on files.
The first paper Hunton was accused of faking, ironically about accounting fraud, was retracted in 2012.
Here’s the notice for “The relationship between perceived tone at the top and earnings quality”: Continue reading Second retraction appears for former accounting professor James Hunton
In November 2014, Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures withdrew an online-first publication on the grounds that, over the previous two years, the corresponding author has not responded to questions regarding formatting.
There is, apparently, a good reason for that, although the notice for “Analysis of Effective Properties of Three-phase Electro-magneto-elastic Solids” suggests the editors of the journal are unaware of it:
Continue reading Dead men tell no tales – nor respond to journal’s formatting queries
The former director of the X-ray crystallography lab at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity to have faked findings in three papers, is once again earning a government salary, this time as a patent examiner, Retraction Watch has learned. Continue reading Exclusive: Former NIH lab head who faked data now working as government patent examiner
Plagiarism earned genomics researchers an erratum, not a retraction, in BioMed Central journal BioData Mining.
We keep a list of best euphemisms for plagiarism, and this one is right up there.
Here’s the notice for “An iteration normalization and test method for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data”: Continue reading New favorite plagiarism euphemism: “Inadvertently copied text”
A former researcher at the University of Pittsburgh inflated the number of mice used in his experiments, and faked data in a number of images in a paper reporting the results, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Dong Xiao admitting to having
intentionally fabricated data contained in a paper entitled ‘Guggulsterone inhibits prostate cancer growth via inactivation of Akt regulated by ATP citrate signaling,’ specifically Figure 6G,
the ORI reports. The paper was published in in July 2014 in Oncotarget. Here’s Figure 6: Continue reading Former Pitt cancer researcher admits to faking findings
Back in November 2013, we wrote about a correction in PNAS about a May 2012 paper by a group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York who, as we said at the time
had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher — what we might call plagiarism, in a less charitable mood.
Continue reading Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.
Hindawi journal PPAR Research has pulled a cancer immunology paper after discovering it contained almost no new information.
Instead, it was a Frankenstein-style stitch job, containing sentences ripped from 33 different papers. 18 of those ended up in the citations; for 15 more, the authors didn’t even do them that courtesy. You can see a meticulously color-coded call out here.
Here’s the notice for “A Role for PPARy in the Regulation of Cytokines in Immune Cells and Cancer”: Continue reading Franken-paper from U.S. federal contractor heads to the grave
A postdoc at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation faked data in a submitted paper and in a grant application, according to a new report from the Office of Research Integrity.
Bin Kang admitted to the misconduct, in which he Continue reading Oklahoma postdoc admits to faking data in grant application, submitted paper