Public health expert Stephen Leeder has been ousted as editor of Australia’s top medical journal after he questioned the decision to outsource the journal’s production and other tasks to publishing giant Elsevier.
Leeder, emeritus professor at the University of Sydney, told the Medical Observer he was asked to leave when he and the journal’s publisher, AMPCo, couldn’t see eye to eye on the decision:
The Egyptian Journal of Anaesthesia is retracting a 2014 paper by a pair of researchers at Cairo University who appear to have tinkered with their protocol after having received ethics approval.
The paper, titled “Can Sugammadex improve the reversal profile of Atracurium under Sevoflurane anesthesia?” was written by Heba Ismail Ahmed Nagy and Hany Wafik Elkadi, both in the department of anesthesiology.
Sugammadex, or Bridion, is given to rapidly reverse the effects of drugs that keep patients motionless during surgery. It is available throughout the world but not, as it happens, in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration has refused to approve the agent because of fears that it might provoke severe allergic-like reactions.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Drug study pulled after researchers admit altering trial protocol
The first author of a review article on extracting pharmacological compounds from marine organisms, published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine, has retracted it due to plagiarism.
There were also some authorship issues, according to the retraction notice for the paper, which absolves the last author, based at Pondicherry University in India, from responsibility:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and the First Author. Both the first author and the journal’s editor confirmed that Dr. A Yogamoorthi is not responsible for the plagiarism since his/her name was added without consent.
There is one other author, R. Siva Sankar, also based at Pondicherry. Somewhere along the way, according to the retraction note, the paper scooped up wording from six papers previously published by researchers in Australia. Here’s more from the retraction note for “Antimicrobial secondary metabolites from marine gastropod egg capsules and egg masses”: Continue reading Snail egg article retracted for fishing for material from six other papers
Bone researcher Olga Panagiotopoulou of the University of Queensland has lost a second paper over “errors in the validation protocol and data.”
The retracted paper in the Journal of Biomechanics, about primate jaws, was subject to an expression of concern in May 2014 November 2013, one of two Panagiotopoulou’s group issued last year over methodological problems. The other paper was later retracted. According to Panagiotopoulou, there will be two more retractions forthcoming, both in the Journal of Anatomy.
According John Hutchinson, last author of the other retracted paper, that withdrawal was the result of an investigation at his school, the Royal Veterinary College.
Panagiotopoulou emailed us with an explanation:
A team spread across multiple institutions in China and McGill University in Canada has retracted two cancer papers over “inaccurate and inappropriately processed Western Blots.”
Some of the figures were also reused between the two articles, both in Biochimica et Biophysica Acta General Subjects.
The articles both tested the cancer-fighting properties of a derivative of the active compound present in Boswellia serrata gum resin.
Continue reading Cancer team loses two papers for image manipulation
Frank Sauer, formerly of the University of California, Riverside, has had a 2002 letter on epigenetics retracted from Nature due to “inappropriate image manipulation.”
Sauer had two papers retracted from Science last year following a university investigation. Here’s the Nature notice for “Histone methylation by the Drosophila epigenetic transcriptional regulator Ash1:” Continue reading Nature retracts epigenetics paper by author who lost two Science papers last year
Karel Bezouška, the Czech biochemist who was caught on hidden camera breaking into a lab fridge to fake results, has turned it up to eleven with two new retractions.
Both retractions appeared in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, one in October 2014 and one in January 2015. His story began two decades ago in 1994, when he published a paper in Nature that couldn’t be reproduced, and was eventually retracted in 2013.
The best part of the story, of course, is that when his university was attempting to recreate his experiments, Bezouška broke into a lab fridge to tamper with the experiments. Unbeknownst to him, he was caught on hidden camera. Continue reading Two more retractions bring lab break-in biochemist up to eleven
How should scientists think about papers that have undergone what appears to be a cursory peer review? Perhaps the papers were reviewed in a day — or less — or simply green-lighted by an editor, without an outside look. That’s a question Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford University autism researcher, asked herself when she noticed some troubling trends in four autism journals.
Recently, Bishop sparked a firestorm when she wrote several blog posts arguing that these four autism journals had a serious problem. For instance, she found that Johnny Matson, then-editor of Research in Developmental Disabilities and Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, had an unusually high rate of citing his own research – 55% of his citations are to his own papers, according to Bishop. Matson also published a lot in his own journals – 10% of the papers published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders since Matson took over in 2007 have been his. Matson’s prodigious self-citation in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders was initially pointed out by autism researcher Michelle Dawson, as noted in Bishop’s original post.
Short peer reviews of a day or less were also common. Matson no longer edits the journals, both published by Elsevier.
Bishop noted similar findings at Developmental Neurorehabilitation and Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, where the editors (and Matson) frequently published in each others’ journals, and they often had short peer reviews: The median time for Matson’s papers in Developmental Neurorehabilitation between 2010 and 2014 was a day, and many were accepted the day they were submitted, says Bishop.
Although this behavior may seem suspect, it wasn’t necessarily against the journals’ editorial policies. This is the peer review policy at RIDD:
Continue reading Poll: What to do when peer review feels inadequate?
Teresita Briones, a former nursing professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who studied neuroscience, manipulated images in five papers, according to the Office of Research Integrity.
Briones, who focused on neuroplasticity: Continue reading Wayne State neuroscientist fudged images in five papers
Alfredo Fusco, the researcher in Italy who is under criminal investigation and has had seven papers retracted, has lost yet another study.
The investigation, which came to light in late 2013, had focused on eight papers thought to demonstrate evidence of image manipulation.
The latest paper, in the European Journal of Cancer, studied mice with a genetic alteration associated with lipomas (benign fatty growths) in humans.
Here’s part of the notice for “Expression of a truncated Hmga1b gene induces gigantism, lipomatosis and B-cell lymphomas in mice”: Continue reading Cancer researcher under investigation in Italy notches eighth retraction