Nature has issued an Expression of Concern for a paper co-authored by a scientist who threatened to sue us last year for writing about another Expression of Concern for one of his other papers.
Here’s the “Editorial Expression of Concern” for “Non-adaptive origins of interactome complexity:”
A new editorial in the Journal of Patient Safety accuses former editor and patient safety expert Charles Denham of having undeclared conflicts of interest in nine out of ten articles he published in the journal.
Denham was at the center of massive controversy earlier this year, when the government accused him of taking more than $11 million in kickbacks from medical supply company CareFusion. Supposedly, he took the money to influence the National Quality Forum, where Denham was a co-chair of safe practices, to endorce ChloraPrep, a CareFusion antiseptic.
Cheryl Clark, at HealthLeaders Media, was first to report on the new editorial. Here’s what the editors wrote: Continue reading Controversial editor and patient safety expert had undisclosed COIs in 9 of 10 papers
Last week, we wrote about conservationist Stuart Pimm receiving criticism for casual sexism in a recent book review.
The journal did not retract the review, but it released an editor’s note condemning the language Pimm used, including quoting a movie scene in which a man told a woman “I don’t take whores in taxis.” Some readers have questioned whether this is really an instance of sexism, including here in the Retraction Watch comments.
So we reached out to Amanda Stanley, a conservation scientist who was so troubled by the book review that she wrote a letter to the editor, to be published soon in Biological Conservation. Here’s her powerful explanation of where this fits in the overall conversation about sexism in science:
Continue reading “I’m so done with it”: Conservationist speaks out against sexism in science
The Elsevier journal Biological Conservation has put out an apology, but not a retraction, after outcry over a bizarre, misogynistic non sequitur in a book review by Duke conservation biologist Stuart Pimm.
Here’s the introduction to Pimm’s review of Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth, which went online in October ahead of its December print publication: Continue reading ‘‘I don’t take whores in taxis”: Casual sexism in scientific journal leads to editor’s note
A former Vanderbilt University biomedical engineer committed fraud on a massive scale, according to a new Office of Research Integrity (ORI) report.
Igor Dzhura is banned from receiving federal funding for three years, and is retracting six papers, which have been cited more than 500 times. Since leaving Vanderbilt, he has worked at SUNY Upstate Medical University, and now works at Novartis.
According to the ORI, Dzhura was a busy boy at Vanderbilt, faking images and drastically inflating the number of experiments he conducted by duplicating computer files and saving them in nested folders. The total body count from his work includes: Continue reading Updated: Former Vanderbilt scientist faked nearly 70 images, will retract 6 papers: ORI
This one brings together a bunch of our favorite topics, including plagiarism, poetry, and predatory publishers. Look, alliteration!
Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who often publishes under the name R-L Etienne Barnett, has been accused of plagiarizing at least 18 articles by other scholars, mostly analyses of French poetry, as well as duplicating his own work at least eight times.
Most recently, French literary theorist Michel Charles published a dissection of Barnett’s history of plagiarism on lit crit site Fabula. Barnett had sent an article to Poétique, the poetry journal Charles edits. Charles quickly realized something was amiss (all quotes in this post were originally in French, and have been translated via Google): Continue reading Tracking down lit crit plagiarism leads to “discourses of madness”
In June, we reported on a retraction in Current Biology that came after a number of PubPeer commenters suggested that the authors had engaged in figure manipulation, memorably comparing watching the published videos to playing the old-school arcade game “Space Invaders.”
Now a second paper from the same team has been retracted from Biology Open after the authors “were unable to repeat the results.” The journal was unable to get in touch with first author Livana Soetedio, whom the University of Illinois at Chicago found had fabricated the data and images in both publications.
Here’s the notice for “Targeting of vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2, VPAC2, a secretin family G-protein coupled receptor, to primary cilia”: Continue reading Second retraction appears for arcade game-like image manipulation
A paper by a former postdoc at MD Anderson Cancer Center who “admitted to knowingly and intentionally falsifying” a figure has been retracted.
In August, the Office of Research Integrity announced that it had sanctioned Jun Fu for faking data in a study of the results of a mouse study of NVP-HSP990, a Novartis compound designed to fight brain tumors. Here’s the notice for the study in question, published in Cancer Research:
Continue reading Retraction appears for faked study of Novartis anti-cancer compound
The Leadership Quarterly has retracted a trio of papers by Frederick Walumbwa, an “ethical leadership” guru at Florida International University, whose work has come under scrutiny for flawed methodology. And another journal has pulled one of his articles for similar reasons. That brings his count – as far as we can tell — to seven retractions and a mega-correction.
Meanwhile, Arizona State University, Walumbwa’s former employer, has found
that the preponderance of evidence does not support the charge of research misconduct by Dr. Walumbwa…
but that he engaged in “poor research practice.”
The bottom line, according to the Leadership Quarterly, which first announced problems with the articles in February:
Lancet Respiratory Medicine has issued an expression of concern for a meta-analysis on tracheostomy in the intensive care unit that they published earlier this year.
The paper, “Effect of early versus late or no tracheostomy on mortality of critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation: a systematic review and meta-analysis“, came from a group at Harvard, Weill Cornell and the University of Athens. The authors purported to find that: Continue reading Lancet journal puts ICU paper on watch after authors acknowledge potentially fatal flaw
