It’s official.* Joachim Boldt now holds the record for the most retractions by a single author.
As we reported the other day, a group of anesthesia journals was on the verge of revealing a list of 89 articles by Joachim Boldt that would require retraction because the German researcher had failed to receive proper approval from ethics officials for his studies. Today, the coalition issued a letter making the retractions official.
The 89 papers join an earlier retraction in October.
Biochemical Journal has retracted two articles by Naoki Mori, bringing the total number of pulled papers by the Japanese cancer researcher to sixteen.
As with the previous Mori retractions, the latest ones — of papers published in 2007 and 2010 — involve unreliable images. Mori, you’ll recall, had recycled control blots from study to study over the years, and was dismissed from his academic post in August.
The 2007 paper, “Activation of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 in human T-cell leukaemia virus type 1-infected cell lines and primary adult T-cell leukaemia cells,” also included a frequent co-author Mariko Tomita, who has been implicated in the deception. It has been cited 15 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The 2010 article, “Inhibition of Akt/GSK3β signalling pathway by Legionella pneumophila is involved in induction of T-cell apoptosis,” has not yet been cited.
In each case, the retraction notice is the same: Continue reading Two more retractions for Mori make 16 — but not a record
February has turned out to be a bad month for people found guilty of plagiarism. On Friday, we covered the case of the German foreign defense minister who lost his PhD after his university became aware he had copied passages from newspaper stories into his thesis.
And now we’ve learned that the University of Sao Paolo Paulo (USP) dismissed a full professor earlier this month after an investigation into a study he retracted last year because parts of it had been plagiarized. It has also stripped one of the professor’s former students of her PhD. Continue reading University of Sao Paulo fires professor after a retraction for plagiarism
Another retraction notice for a paper published by Silvia Bulfone-Paus and colleagues has appeared, this one for a 2005 paper in Molecular and Cellular Biology.
The retraction notice is brief but to the point: Continue reading Ninth Bulfone-Paus retraction notice appears, in Molecular and Cellular Biology
The Korean Journal of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery has retracted 17 papers, with the common theme of ‘overlap’ — almost always a euphemism for plagiarism, whether self or otherwise.
Published between 1993 and 2006, the articles came from a group of authors at the department of otolaryngology at Ajou University School of Medicine in Suwon, South Korea. Their topics range from “The Effects of Intratympanic Steroid Injection for the Patients with Refractory Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss” to “Study for Reversibility of Experimental Cholesteatoma Using Mongolian Gerbil.”
The retraction notices all read basically the same way. Here’s the one for the gerbil paper: Continue reading Korean ENT journal retracts 17 papers, citing ‘overlap’
Since we first wrote about the travails of Spirocor’s bedside, noninvasive test for coronary artery disease, we’ve been trying, without much success, to find out more information.
But as they say about every dog, our day has come.
As we initially reported, Ron Waksman, a prominent Washington, D.C. cardiologist and editor-in-chief of Cardiovascular and Revascularization Medicine, was first author of one of two papers about the Spirocor technology that were published in 2010. The other, by Shiyovich, et al, was retracted earlier this month by the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, which triggered our interest in this case.
At the time, we couldn’t find any evidence that Waksman’s article had been retracted, and Waksman has not responded to multiple requests for comment. Today we spoke with Kate Coons, the journal’s managing editor, who told us that the authors had sought a retraction for the article, “An innovative noninvasive respiratory stress test indicates significant coronary artery disease,” in December, and that it had posted one on its website on Jan. 6 of this year. It will be in print in an upcoming issue.
The notice is not available on Medline, but it can be found on ScienceDirect: Continue reading More on SPIROCOR noninvasive heart disease test: Second retraction (in fact the first) says little
We’re continuing to follow the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia. As we reported on Tuesday, Ahluwalia was dismissed from graduate school at the University of Cambridge years before a University College London (UCL) investigation found had renumbered files to deceive a co-author, and had likely sabotaged his colleagues’ work while manipulating his solutions to improve how his results looked. The results of that investigation came to light as part of a Nature retraction.
Ahluwalia now works — and studies plagiarism, in fact — at the school of health and bioscience at the University of East London. We asked Neville Punchard, the school’s dean, whether the university was aware of Ahluwalia’s past. Punchard replied by email: Continue reading University of East London “looking into” Jatinder Ahluwalia’s career
Last week, we reported that the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology had noted that a 2002 paper by Silvia Bulfone-Paus and colleagues had been retracted, but hadn’t yet published the retraction notice. A commenter tipped us off this week that the notice is out: Continue reading Scandinavian Journal of Immunology publishes Bulfone-Paus retraction notice
Here at Retraction Watch, we’ve been following the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia with interest. You may recall that an investigation by University College London (UCL) found “beyond reasonable doubt” that Ahluwalia had renumbered files to deceive a co-author. UCL was also “highly confident” that Ahluwalia had messed with his solutions to make his results look better, and sabotaged his colleagues’ work. The report of that investigation was part of a Nature retraction notice.
We’ve now learned that UCL was not the first scene of misconduct by Ahluwalia. Yesterday, we obtained letters by University of Cambridge faculty and administrators describing repeated — and in the words of of one professor, amateurish — data fabrication by Ahluwalia that led to his dismissal from the university’s graduate program.
In a letter dated November 10, 1997, Martin Brand, then Ahluwalia’s PhD advisor, wrote: Continue reading Exclusive: Researcher found guilty of misconduct at UCL had been dismissed from Cambridge for data fabrication
Self-plagiarism alert: A very similar version of this post is being published online in Anesthesiology News, where one of us (AM) is managing editor.
Unglaublich is the German word for unbelievable, and it’s an apt description for the latest development in the case of Joachim Boldt.
Boldt, a prominent German anesthesiologist, has been at the center of a research and publishing investigation since last October, when the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia retracted a 2009 article of his over concerns of data manipulation. This morning, the German medical board overseeing the case, the Landesärztekammer Rheinland-Pfalz (LÄK-RLP), released its findings — and they are truly stunning.
According to LAK, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 of Boldt’s published articles might require retraction because the investigator failed to obtain approval from an institutional review board to conduct the research.
We don’t read German. But, fortunately, the LÄK-RLP announcement was accompanied by a joint letter posted to the websites of 11 major anesthesia journals. We do read English, and here’s what that letter says: Continue reading Unglaublich! Boldt investigation may lead to more than 90 retractions