Jesús A. Lemus, he of the likely ghost author and questionable data, has earned his sixth retraction, this one in Biology Letters.
Here’s the notice for “Stress associated with group living in a long-lived bird:” Continue reading Retraction six appears for Jesús Angel Lemus
Clinics in Perinatology has a rather intriguing retraction.
The paper in question was a June 2012 review by a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco’s division of pediatric surgery, titled “Maternal-Fetal Surgery: History and General Considerations.”
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Look ma, no guidelines! Paper on unpublished fetal surgery recommendations retracted
A top cardiology researcher, Robert Hegele, of the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, has retracted a 15-year-old review after editors were made aware that it was “very similar” to another of his reviews.
Here’s the December 2012 notice for the paper, which has been cited 23 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Duplication leads to retraction of 1997 paper on heart disease genes
A group of authors have retracted a Cell paper describing a mouse model of autism because of image problems.
The senior author on the paper — there were 22 altogether — is Paul Worley of Johns Hopkins. Here’s the notice for “Enhanced Polyubiquitination of Shank3 and NMDA Receptor in a Mouse Model of Autism:” Continue reading Neuroscientists retract Cell autism model paper for “improperly assembled” figures
Yesterday, we reported on two retractions in the Journal of Neuroscience whose notices referred to a University of Lisbon report that had determined there was “substantial data misrepresentation” in the original articles. The notice didn’t say anything about misconduct, but when we see “misrepresentation,” we tend to think — as do many others — that there had been funny business.
But we heard back this morning from the senior author of the study, Ana M. Sebastião, and there’s a lot more to this story. It turns out that the University of Lisbon committee that wrote the report concluded, unanimously, that Continue reading University of Lisbon investigation that spawned neuroscience retractions found no evidence of misconduct
Retraction Watch Rule 5.1, which governs ironic article titles (and does not actually exist), clearly states that researchers who plagiarize should avoid the use of words like “new” or “novel” when describing their research (or lack thereof). Failure to adhere to Rule 5.1 can lead to embarrassment — as in the case below.
A pair of electrical engineers from Islamic Azad University, in Isfahan, Iran, has lost their 2012 article in Computers in Biology and Medicine, titled “A novel real-time patient-specific seizure diagnosis algorithm based on analysis of EEG and ECG signals using spectral and spatial features and improved particle swarm optimization classifier,” because, well, it wasn’t. Turns out, the researchers lifted data from an Irish group who, several years earlier, had proposed their own “novel algorithm for neonatal seizure detection.”
As the admirably detailed retraction notice explains: Continue reading Note to authors: Please don’t use the word “novel” when you plagiarize
A professor of chemical engineering in India has retracted two papers after what he called a “deliberate lapse” of submitting the work without the knowledge of his co-author.
The two papers by Kailas L. Wasewar, then an associate professor in the Chemical Engineering department of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, India — he appears to be at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee now — appeared in 2006 in consecutive issues of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Quarterly, the official journal of the Croatian Society of Chemical Engineers, Slovenian Chemical Society and Austrian Association of Bioprocess Technology.
The retraction notice appeared in the December issue, following a 27 November letter to the editor: Continue reading Chemical engineer apologizes for “deliberate lapse,” retracts two papers from Croatian journal
A University of Lisbon investigation has prompted two retractions in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The papers share a few authors, including senior author Ana M. Sebastião. Here’s the notice for the first paper: Continue reading University of Lisbon finds “substantial data misrepresentation;” two Journal of Neuroscience papers retracted
Royal jelly — “the goo that sustains honeybees destined for royalty” and is touted dubiously for everything “from youthful skin to virility,” as Nature put it — is apparently a hot research topic. So when a Retraction Watch tipster sent us a corrigendum that seemed to have done something we hadn’t seen before — retract a single figure, without saying why — we figured we’d check it out.
Here’s the text of the corrigendum: Continue reading Royal jelly figure flushed: Author removes figure from 2002 paper
An anti-terrorism researcher at the University of Southern Denmark has had a number of papers in conference proceedings retracted for plagiarism.
Debora Weber-Wulff, who has researched plagiarism for a decade, reports on her blog Copy, Shake, and Paste that eight papers by Nasrullah Memon have been retracted after the Vroniplag website revealed similarities between his work and that of other authors.
According to a university website, Memon is Continue reading Eight papers by anti-terrorism professor retracted for plagiarism