Category: by paywall status

“That was a really bad Friday for us:” WIRED warns four stories were plagiarized

501px-Wired_logo.svgLast Friday, WIRED editor Adam Rogers got a direct message on Twitter that no journalist wants to see. Christina Larson, a freelance writer in China, told him she had seen overlap with her own work in a few WIRED stories, and included links to the relevant pieces.

“She was gracious, just asking for a link back in the future, said she loved WIRED,” Rogers told Retraction Watch by phone this afternoon. It was early morning in San Francisco, so Rogers thanked her for bringing the issue to his attention, and said he’d look at it more closely when he arrived at his desk some 45 minutes later.

It was the start of an episode that would lead to the dismissal of a WIRED reporter, and the addition of warning notes to four of the publication’s stories.
Continue reading “That was a really bad Friday for us:” WIRED warns four stories were plagiarized

Doctor suspended in UK after faking co-authors, data

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 11.04.56 AMA 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

“We are living in hell:” Authors retract 2nd paper due to missing raw data

ijcA 2006 paper investigating the effects of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and celecoxib on prostate cancer cells has been retracted because it appears to contain panels that were duplicated, and the authors could not provide the raw data to show otherwise.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

Author in 2014 peer review ring loses 3 more papers for peer review problems

cover (1)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

Firefly paper flagged following Queensland investigation

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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

Journal retracts 7 papers by MD Anderson cancer researcher long under investigation

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Bharat Aggarwal

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

Peer reviewer steals text for his own chemistry paper, gets sanctioned by journal

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A peer reviewer apparently thought portions of a manuscript he was reviewing were so good he wanted them for himself.

Substantial sections of a paper that Junwei Di reviewed appear in his own paper on a method for making tiny particles of silver to precise specifications. Di is a chemist at Soochow University in China. The journal has banned Di from submitting papers or serving as a peer reviewer “for a certain time.”

The retraction note for the 2015 paper, “Controllable Electrochemical Synthesis of Silver Nanoparticles on Indium-Tin-Oxide-Coated Glass” explains how the editors at ChemElectroChem became aware of the plagiarism:

Continue reading Peer reviewer steals text for his own chemistry paper, gets sanctioned by journal

Don’t perform heart surgery described in retracted paper, says editor

Screen Shot 2016-02-08 at 10.53.50 PMA journal is retracting a paper about a heart surgery technique after discovering the researchers did not have ethics approval to perform a the procedure on 130 patients. What’s more, the local cardiac surgical society had asked the first author to stop using the method in 2004, six years before the study was complete.

The patients in the study had atrial septal defects — a congenital hole in their hearts that allows blood to leak between chambers. The retraction note concludes with the editor in chief advising other surgeons to not use the method to close the hole described in the retracted article, “Long-term assay of off-pump atrial septal defect closure using vena caval inflow occlusion and minimally invasive approaches in 130 cases.”

A concern from a reader unraveled the paper. The retraction note explains how:

Continue reading Don’t perform heart surgery described in retracted paper, says editor

Paper on alleged – and paradoxical – health benefits of obesity pulled for plagiarism

cancer causes and controlAn article that suggested there is no benefit to being overweight among cancer survivors – the so-called “obesity paradox” – is being retracted for plagiarizing large sections from another paper that explored the same topic in cardiovascular disease.

The journal Cancer Causes & Control pulled the 2014 article last June after determining it contained “large portions” of text from another paper in Preventive Medicine by a different set of authors, which suggested that evidence linking obesity to health benefits in cardiovascular disease may stem from a form of selection bias.

Here’s more from the retraction note: Continue reading Paper on alleged – and paradoxical – health benefits of obesity pulled for plagiarism

Author dispute, “considerable overlap” retract chemistry study

Spectrochimica Acta Part A- Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy

A chemistry journal has issued a retraction after “a thorough and time-consuming analysis” revealed two out of four authors did not agree to submitting an article published in May, which also contains “considerable overlap and redundancy” with another paper published a few weeks prior in a different journal.

Shortly after the paper appeared in Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, the journal was told “that parts of the manuscript were reused” from an article in the Journal of the Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers that was published online March 16. That led to the investigation, and the discovery of the additional authorship issues.

Here’s the full notice: Continue reading Author dispute, “considerable overlap” retract chemistry study