A paper about combating cyberterrorism is coming under fire after allegations of plagiarism sparked on social media.
Soon after the paper was published by the journal Computer Technology and Application in 2015, Orgnet LLC, a network analysis software company, announced on Twitter that the paper took content from its webpage. The firm tweeted: Continue reading Cyberterrorism paper under attack for plagiarizing from multiple sources
After temporarily removing a paper that suggested a link between the vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV) and behavioral issues, the journal has now retracted it.
Vaccine says the reason is “serious concerns regarding the scientific soundness of the article,” including flawed methodology and unjustified claims.
Christopher A. Shaw, a co-author on the paper and a researcher at the University of British Columbia, told us he has seen the notice, but doesn’t know the specific issues the journal had with the paper:
We still don’t know why [Editor in Chief] Dr Poland removed the article.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Behavioral abnormalities in young female mice following administration of aluminum adjuvants and the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil:”
A doctor in Manchester, UK has received a year’s suspension by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service.
Gemina Doolub admitted that she fabricated research data and submitted papers without the knowledge of her co-authors, including faking an email address for a co-author, a news story in the BMJ reports. The research in question was part of two retractions that Doolub received in 2013, one of which we covered at the time.
Doolub’s research examined ways to treat and avoid microvascular obstruction — that is, blocked arteries. Doolub did the work while at Oxford.
“Intracoronary Adenosine versus Intravenous Adenosine during Primary PCI for ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction: Which One Offers Better Outcomes in terms of Microvascular Obstruction?” was published in International Scholarly Research Notices Cardiology and has not yet been cited, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
As the BMJ reports, in that paper,
Continue reading Doctor suspended in UK after faking co-authors, data
Mike Rossner has made a name for himself in academic publishing as somewhat of a “manipulation detective.” As the editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, in 2002 he initiated a policy of screening all images in accepted manuscripts, causing the journal to reject roughly 1% of papers that had already passed peer review. Other journals now screen images, but finding manipulation is only the first step – handling it responsibly is another matter. Rossner has started his own company to help journals and institutions manage this tricky process. We talked to him about his new venture.
Retraction Watch: What are the primary services offered by your company?
High-profile social psychologist Jens Förster has earned two retractions following an investigation by his former workplace. He agreed to the retractions as part of a settlement with the German Society for Psychology (DGPs).
The papers are two of eight that were found to contain “strong statistical evidence for low veracity.” According to the report from an expert panel convened at the request of the board of the University of Amsterdam, following
an extensive statistical analysis, the experts conclude that many of the experiments described in the articles show an exceptionally linear link. This linearity is not only surprising, but often also too good to be true because it is at odds with the random variation within the experiments.
One of those eight papers was retracted in 2014. In November, the American Psychology Association received an appeal to keep two of the papers, and Förster agreed to the retractions of two more:
Continue reading Psychologist Jens Förster earns second and third retractions as part of settlement
A 2006 paper investigating the effects of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and celecoxib on prostate cancer cells has been retracted because it appears to contain panels that were duplicated, and the authors could not provide the raw data to show otherwise.
This is the second paper the authors have lost because they couldn’t furnish the original data to defend their work against allegations of image manipulation. The reason: the Institute for Cancer Prevention in New York, where the authors did the work, shut its doors abruptly in 2004, co-author Bhagavathi A. Narayanan told us. (The institute closed thanks to $5.7 million in grant that was misspent, the New York Post reported at the time.)
Recently, some of Narayanan’s papers have been questioned on PubPeer; her work has been the subject of an investigation at New York University, where Narayanan is now based.
Narayanan told us that the criticism of their work has deeply affected her and her co-authors:
Continue reading “We are living in hell:” Authors retract 2nd paper due to missing raw data
Former accounting professor James Hunton has added a 33rd retraction to his total, solidifying his position at #10 on our leaderboard.
Hunton’s official total is 33.5, since one journal retracted only one section of a paper, making it a “partial” retraction. Most of those retractions came last year, the fallout from an investigation at Bentley University which concluded that the accounting researcher had committed misconduct. Hunton resigned from the university in 2012 after his first retraction, citing family matters.
After the Bentley University investigation, the journal Contemporary Accounting Research conducted its own review of the paper, and found “no credible evidence exists to support the validity of the data in the study,” according to the retraction note for “Decision Aid Reliance: A Longitudinal Field Study Involving Professional Buy-Side Financial Analysts.”
Here’s the entire retraction note:
Continue reading Former accounting prof adds his 33rd retraction
A journal is retracting three papers — including one that is highly cited — after learning the reviewers that recommended publication had conflicts of interest.
This is a case of family values gone awry: The author common to all papers is Cheng-Wu Chen at the National Kaohsiung Marine University in Taiwan, the twin brother of one Peter Chen, who was a the center of a peer review ring that SAGE busted in 2014 (and holder of the number #3 spot on our leaderboard). Cheng-Wu Chen apparently wasn’t an innocent bystander in that episode: Of the 60 retracted papers by SAGE, Cheng-Wu Chen was a co-author on 21.
The retraction notes for all three papers — published in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries — are identical:
Continue reading Author in 2014 peer review ring loses 3 more papers for peer review problems
A BMC journal has added an expression of concern to a paper on firefly genes after a University of Queensland investigation determined a table should be credited to a different source.
According to a representative of the university, the investigation found no evidence of misconduct. The university submitted an erratum that the journal chose not to publish; in the EOC note, the journal says the wording of the erratum is “under dispute.”
The erratum submitted to the journal specifies that the table should be attributed to former UQ biologist Robert Birch, who was not an author on the paper. The investigation concluded that the authors had not committed misconduct and “acted in good faith” in using the table, Anton Middelberg, University of Queensland Pro-Vice-Chancellor told us.
The paper, “Synthetic versions of firefly luciferase and Renilla luciferase reporter genes that resist transgene silencing in sugarcane, published in BMC Plant Biology, has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the expression of concern:
Continue reading Firefly paper flagged following Queensland investigation
An MD Anderson Cancer Center researcher who has been under investigation by the institution for at least several years has had seven papers retracted from a single journal.
Bharat Aggarwal told us in 2012 that MD Anderson was investigating his work, but in 2013 threatened to sue us for reporting on the case. Aggarwal is no longer listed in the MD Anderson directory, and an email to him there bounced.
This week, Biochemical Pharmacology retracted seven studies of which he is the only common author, noting the “data integrity has become questionable.” The papers have been cited a total of more than 500 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge; one has been designated as “highly cited.” Here are the seven retractions: Continue reading Journal retracts 7 papers by MD Anderson cancer researcher long under investigation