Call it uncreative non-destruction. 
A team from China and, it appears, Mississippi, has lost a paper in Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation for duplicate publication.
Here’s the notice (a PDF): Continue reading Duplication leads to collapse in Nondestructive Testing
A rising star at MIT has retracted a paper after an investigation found that her former postdoc had “falsified or fabricated figures.”
Alice Ting, winner of an NIH Directors Pioneer Award and named one of Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35,” published the paper, “Imaging Activity-Dependent Regulation of Neurexin-Neuroligin Interactions Using trans-Synaptic Enzymatic Biotinylation,” in Cell in 2010 along with Amar Thyagarajan.
The notice is refreshingly detailed given the circumstances: Continue reading MIT lab retracts Cell synapse tagging paper for falsification or fabrication
Today brings two journal editorials about misconduct and retractions. They take, if we may, a bit of an optimistic and perhaps even blindered approach.
In an editorial titled “Scientific misconduct occurs, but is rare,” Boston University’s Richard Primack, editor of Biological Conservation, highlights a Corrigendum of a paper by Jesus Angel Lemus, the veterinary researcher who has retracted seven papers: Continue reading Not in my journal: Two editors take stock of misconduct in their fields — and don’t find much
A Brazilian entomologist, Claudio Jose von Zuben, has been forced to retract two papers from 1997 after editors became aware that he and his colleagues had used the same figure in both.
First, the notice from Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz: Continue reading Duplication forces retractions of two 15-year-old entomology papers
Sometimes, the headlines just write themselves.
Two scientists in India have had a paper retracted after it became clear they had plagiarized a study by a Swedish researcher. Here’s the notice for “A conceptual model of people’s approach to sanitation,” from Science of the Total Environment: Continue reading Plagiarism flushes sanitation paper
Are plagiarists parasites? And what if they work in the field of parasitism — like M. Shafiq Ansari and colleagues at Aligarh Muslim University in India?
The Journal of Insect Behavior is retracting a 2011 paper by Ansari’s group, “Foraging of host-habitat and superparasitism in Cotesia glomerata: A gregarious parasitoid of Pieris brassicae,” for its similarity to a 2003 article on the same species by other researchers. The insect in question is a form of wasp that, in a case of life imitating Alien, lays its eggs in living caterpillars, which the little buggers eat from the inside out. (Turnabout apparently is fair play in this grisly interaction.)
Here’s the retraction notice (it’s a PDF): Continue reading Parasitology plagiarists get retraction — and a publishing ban
A group of researchers from Taiwan has been forced to retract their 2012 paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy for what appears to be a case of double submission.
The paper was titled “Electricity harvest from wastewaters using microbial fuel cell with sulfide as sole electron donor.”
As the retraction notice explains: Continue reading “Different but similar” data lead to retraction of fuel cell paper
The journal Oncogene has retracted a 2005 paper from a group led by Jose Roman-Gomez, a Spanish researcher who appears to be a serial image manipulator/misappropriator.
The article, “Promoter hypomethylation of the LINE-1 retrotransposable elements activates sense/antisense transcription and marks the progression of chronic myeloid leukemia,” was published online in September 2005 and has been cited 106 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Now comes this: Continue reading Lifted figure prompts retraction of Oncogene paper by Roman-Gomez
Diederik Stapel is up to 49 retractions.
Here are the latest three, from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: Continue reading “When we wonder what it all means”: Stapel retraction count rises to 49
There’s a new retraction in the journal Carbon.
The case didn’t involve a Carbon copy — say, plagiarism or duplication — but rather an instance of fraud in a Japanese university, part of a larger case we covered last August.
Here’s the retraction notice for the paper, “The role of Fe species in the pyrolysis of Fe phthalocyanine and phenolic resin for preparation of carbon-based cathode catalysts,” which appeared in August 2010: Continue reading “False data” forces retraction of Carbon paper co-authored by postdoc who led to PI’s suspension