Leonard Zelig, meet Zvi Herzig.
The journal Circulation has issued an expression of concern about a 2015 letter, putatively written by Herzig, in which the author poked holes in a review article about e-cigarettes.
According to the EoC, however, Herzig, like Zelig, may be a bit of a chameleon.
Continue reading Letter on vaping science paper earns expression of concern because author made up a degree
Two months after Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital said they were requesting the retraction of more than 30 papers from a former cardiac stem cell lab there, two American Heart Association journals have retracted more than a dozen papers from the lab.
Yesterday, Circulation retracted three papers, and Circulation Research retracted 10. All 13 were among 15 subjected to expressions of concern last month. Continue reading Anversa cardiac stem cell lab earns 13 retractions
More than four and a half years after questions were first raised about work in a cardiac stem cell lab at Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a year and a half after the Brigham and Partners Healthcare paid $10 million to settle allegations of fraud in the lab’s data, a month after Harvard the Brigham disclosed that they were calling for the retractions of more than 30 papers from the lab, and three weeks after the NIH paused a clinical trial based on the work, two leading journals have issued an expression of concern about 15 papers from the lab.
But expressions of concern are not retractions, of course. From the notice, in Circulation and Circulation Research, both of which are published by the American Heart Association: Continue reading Journals stamp expressions of concern on 15 papers from Anversa’s cardiac stem cell lab
Title: Patient Education After CABG: Are We Teaching the Wrong Information?
What Caught Our Attention: We’ve written about the controversy surrounding a commonly used tool to measure whether patients are sticking to their drug regimen, known as the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-8). It can cost thousands of dollars — and using it without payment/permission earns researchers a call from a collector, who has used legal threats to compel multiple teams to withdraw their papers (a phenomenon we wrote about in Science). The creator of the tool argues it’s copyrighted, and demanding fees ensures researchers use it properly, which avoids putting patients at risk. We’ve found a notice (paywalled, tsk-tsk) that reveals another group of authors used the tool without permission and, according to the notice, “incorrectly.”
Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Using this research tool? You’d better ask first
A paper accidentally credited the wrong researcher with providing part of an experiment.
It turns out that one of the authors supplied an expression vector to a Circulation paper about the molecular underpinnings of atherosclerosis — not the outside researcher originally thanked in the acknowledgements section.
The correction notice to the paper makes the situation sound more mysterious than it appears to be:
Continue reading Vector wasn’t a gift after all, correction notes
The University of Gothenburg in Sweden is investigating several papers co-authored by biologist Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson after they were challenged on PubPeer.
Sumitran-Holgersson already has one retraction under her belt — of a 2005 Blood paper, after another investigation concluded the results “cannot be considered reliable.” Sumitran-Holgersson and her husband, co-author Jan Holgersson, did not sign the retraction notice. Both were based at the Karolinska Institutet (KI) at the time, but have since moved to the University of Gothenburg.
Now, the University of Gothenburg has launched its own investigation of the papers questioned on PubPeer, according to Continue reading Biologist’s research under investigation in Sweden after being questioned on PubPeer
Piero Anversa, a stem cell researcher who we recently learned is leaving Harvard and Brigham & Women’s Hospital after suing them, has added a disclosure statement to six publications.
The four papers and two letters were published in Circulation, and all bear identical corrections:
Piero Anversa, MD, discloses that he is a member of Analogous, LLC.
The author regrets this omission.
Trouble is, we can’t find a company by that name. What we do know:
A major correction has been posted for an update to international guidelines on reporting outcomes of people receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Circulation published the paper online in 2014; the correction was issued before it appeared in print, in the journal’s September 29, 2015 issue. “When reviewing the final proof for print publication, the author noticed some errors and requested changes,” according to a spokesperson for the journal’s publisher, the American Heart Association.
The notice is so long, we’re only including the first paragraph, most of which is taken up by just the title of the paper:
Continue reading Mega-correction for updated CPR reporting guidelines
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
Circulation has retracted a 2012 study by a group of Harvard heart specialists over concerns of corrupt data, and the university is investigating. The group was led by Piero Anversa, a leading cardiologist, and Joseph Loscalzo — who will be familiar to readers of Circulation as the editor in chief of that journal. (Anversa’s also on the editorial board).
Continue reading Harvard and the Brigham investigating leading heart group for “compromised” data
