Millennium Villages Project forced to correct Lancet paper on foreign aid as leader leaves team

A senior member of a high-profile foreign aid research team has left the project on the heels of a Lancet correction of a heavily criticized paper the team published earlier this month.

Paul Pronyk, who until last week was director of monitoring and evaluation at Columbia University’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development, which runs the Millennium Villages Project, wrote a letter to the Lancet acknowledging errors in the paper, “The effect of an integrated multisector model for achieving the Millennium Development Goals and improving child survival in rural sub-Saharan Africa: a non-randomised controlled assessment,” originally published May 8. That admission came after Jesse Bump, Michael Clemens, Gabriel Demombynes, and Lawrence Haddad wrote a letter criticizing the work, which was published this week accompanied by corrections to the paper: Continue reading Millennium Villages Project forced to correct Lancet paper on foreign aid as leader leaves team

JACS makes it official, retracting Breslow “space dinosaurs” paper for “similarity to his previously published reviews”

Last month, we (and others) reported that the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) had temporarily withdrawn a paper by a former president of the society after a number of chemists pointed out similarities between the March 25 article and previous ones by the author, Ronald Breslow.

The paper had drawn puzzled looks thanks to an April 11 press release — since deleted — headlined “Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?” In its note last month, the journal said: Continue reading JACS makes it official, retracting Breslow “space dinosaurs” paper for “similarity to his previously published reviews”

JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication

Duplication has, as we noted on Twitter the other day, been tripping up more and more scientists. And now self-plagiarism has snared a prominent Columbia University chemist in a paper that left many people scratching their heads to begin with.

As reported by the Chembark blog and Nature, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has pulled a paper by Ronald Breslow for alleged duplication. The page for “On Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth,” originally published on March 25, now includes this: Continue reading JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication

PNAS retracts two papers on osmolytes after researchers discover crucial measurement errors

A good carpenter never blames his tools. But for scientists, sometimes machines do go bad–with disastrous results. Consider the following:

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has retracted two papers by researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States after the scientists learned that their results were based largely on a problem with their highly sensitive instruments.

Continue reading PNAS retracts two papers on osmolytes after researchers discover crucial measurement errors

ORI comes down (hard) on Bengu Sezen, Columbia chemist accused of fraud

The Office of Research Integrity has thrown a heavy book at Bengu Sezen, a former chemist at Columbia University, alleging that school and agency investigators turned up 21 instances of research misconduct by the disgraced scientist.

According to the agency: Continue reading ORI comes down (hard) on Bengu Sezen, Columbia chemist accused of fraud