Accusations of plagiarism spanning at least 14 years have finally caught up with Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who has had 13 papers retracted from a journal he had guest edited.
The dean of the for-profit University of Atlanta has been accused of copying his own and others’ work a number of times, as we wrote in November.
Here’s the notice from Neohelicon editor Péter Hajdu: Continue reading Serial plagiarist loses 13 papers
It took five months, but in December a second retraction popped up for disgraced accounting professor James E. Hunton.
Hunton resigned his teaching post at Bentley University in December of 2012. An extensive investigation by Bentley showed that not only was the data in two papers falsified. Hunton also lied about non-existent confidentiality agreements and tried to destroy evidence of his lies by unsuccessfully wiping his laptop and changing metadata on files.
The first paper Hunton was accused of faking, ironically about accounting fraud, was retracted in 2012.
Here’s the notice for “The relationship between perceived tone at the top and earnings quality”: Continue reading Second retraction appears for former accounting professor James Hunton
In November 2014, Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures withdrew an online-first publication on the grounds that, over the previous two years, the corresponding author has not responded to questions regarding formatting.
There is, apparently, a good reason for that, although the notice for “Analysis of Effective Properties of Three-phase Electro-magneto-elastic Solids” suggests the editors of the journal are unaware of it:
Continue reading Dead men tell no tales – nor respond to journal’s formatting queries
Plagiarism earned genomics researchers an erratum, not a retraction, in BioMed Central journal BioData Mining.
We keep a list of best euphemisms for plagiarism, and this one is right up there.
Here’s the notice for “An iteration normalization and test method for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data”: Continue reading New favorite plagiarism euphemism: “Inadvertently copied text”
A group of scientists at the Chinese Earthquake Administration in Beijing have lost their 2014 paper in Nature Scientific Reports for lifting chunks of text from a previously published article.
The abstract of the paper, “Early magnitude estimation for the MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake using progressively expanded P-wave time window,” states: Continue reading Far from earth-shatteringly new: Plagiarism topples Chinese quake paper
A group of Chinese researchers has retracted a paper, saying that an outside lab switched their immunofluorescent stains with another research group’s.
The group has decided to repeat the experiments on their own next time.
Here’s the notice in Molecular Medicine Reports for “Protective role of Klotho on cardiomyocytes upon hypoxia/reoxygenation via downregulation of Akt and FOXO1 phosphorylation”: Continue reading “Immorally” affecting the literature: Authors blame sloppy work from an outside lab for retraction
Back in November 2013, we wrote about a correction in PNAS about a May 2012 paper by a group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York who, as we said at the time
had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher — what we might call plagiarism, in a less charitable mood.
Continue reading Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.
A team led by David Latchman, a geneticist and administrator at University College London, has notched a mysterious retraction in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and has had 25 more papers questioned on PubPeer.
The JBC notice for “Antiapoptotic activity of the free caspase recruitment domain of procaspase-9: A novel endogenous rescue pathway in cell death” is as useless as they come, a regular occurrence for the journal: Continue reading Prominent geneticist nets retraction, two corrections, and a lot of questions
A pair of cell biologists have taken responsibility for extensive figure errors that scuttled their paper in the Journal of Cell Biology.
While there were five authors, first and last authors Eva Szabo and Michal Opas took responsibility in the notice. A number of figures “contain incorrect data and/or presentation errors,” and the original data isn’t available for verification. The notice is unusually clear about which figures and data are compromised.
The paper was published in 2008, and retracted on January 12, 2015. It has been cited 32 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice for “Calreticulin inhibits commitment to adipocyte differentiation’: Continue reading Fat cell paper earns unusually detailed retraction
An international group of engineers lost a paper in November after the journal realized the majority of the data came from a government assessment of Australia’s energy resources without a citation.
The paper, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, focused on geothermal energy, while the government report was far broader in scope. However, the lack of independent research was enough to sink the review. We covered another Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews retraction recently, making us wonder if this is part of a crack-down for the journal.
Here’s the notice for “A review of geothermal energy resources in Australia: Current status and prospects”: Continue reading Geothermal paper undermined by borrowing data without citing