Last week, we brought you the story of Thong Duc Le and his colleagues, physicists who were forced to retract four papers, including one that cited, as we noted “their own study that had already been retracted for plagiarism.”
The team has now retracted three more papers: Continue reading Three more retractions for Vietnamese physicists who plagiarized a plagiarized paper
A group of French researchers liked their paper on the properties of molten tin so much they published it twice. In the same journal. Four months apart.
The article, “Nitrogen spray atomization of molten tin metal: Powder morphology characteristics,” first appeared online in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. That one has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
In May 2007, the same group, sans two authors, published a paper online in the JMPT (and in January 2008 in print) with the identical title. That article — which managed to get cited three times — has now been retracted: Continue reading Mighty molten powder researchers publish paper in journal twice, months apart
A group of researchers at the University of Utah has retracted two papers from Cell Metabolism after they realized that a dismissed employee had tossed out data that were the basis of some error-laden figures.
Here’s the notice for both papers: Continue reading Authors retract two Cell Metabolism papers after “data were inappropriately removed from the laboratory”
Gerold Schuler, a German immunology researcher who shared the 2006 Deutscher Krebspreis — aka the German Cancer Prize — for his work that contributed to cancer vaccines has retracted a paper in International Immunology following concerns raised by a German science watchdog blog.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Leading cancer vaccines researcher retracts paper for figure “discrepancies” flagged by watchdog blog
In a case that is a good reminder of why journal editors shouldn’t ignore anonymous tips, a Seoul National University stem cell researcher has been forced to retract four papers, and withdraw another under peer review, in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling following a whistleblower’s exhaustive analysis.
Two retractions by Soo Kyung Kang, a professor of veterinary biotechnology at Seoul National University, appeared on May 9 after an anonymous whistleblower sent a 70-slide PowerPoint presentation to the editors of ten journals that contained evidence of suspicious floating error bars, errors larger than actual measurements, pasted-together lanes in PCR gels and RNA and CHIP blots and several cases where the same control blot data is shown across different experiments and in different papers. In all, the whistleblower raises questions about 14 papers in the ten journals.
Here is the May 9 notice for “Nuclear Ago2/HSP60 contributes to broad spectrum of hATSCs function via Oct4 regulation”: Continue reading Whistleblower forces retractions of four stem cell papers amid questions about more than a dozen studies
Last month, we (and others) reported that the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) had temporarily withdrawn a paper by a former president of the society after a number of chemists pointed out similarities between the March 25 article and previous ones by the author, Ronald Breslow.
The paper had drawn puzzled looks thanks to an April 11 press release — since deleted — headlined “Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?” In its note last month, the journal said: Continue reading JACS makes it official, retracting Breslow “space dinosaurs” paper for “similarity to his previously published reviews”
Sometimes, the full story of scientific misdeeds isn’t clear until several retraction notices appear. Take the case of a group of Vietnamese astrophysicists led by Thong Duc Le.
If you were to read a Physics Letters B retraction notice about one of the group’s papers, “Search for cosmological time variation of the fine-structure constant using low-redshifts of quasar,” you wouldn’t have any idea why the paper was retracted, nor that the move was related to any other retractions: Continue reading Astrophysics retraction trail includes paper that plagiarized another already retracted for…plagiarism
It seemed like a touching tribute when Jiasheng Diao dedicated his 2009 article, “Crystal Structure of Butyrate Kinase 2 from Thermotoga maritima, a Member of the ASKHA Superfamily of Phosphotransferases,” in the Journal of Bacteriology to a deceased mentor, Miriam Hasson.
Before her death in January 2006, of a brain tumor, Hasson and her husband, David Sanders, made up a power-team of protein researchers at Purdue.
Hasson was an X-ray crystallographer while Sanders is a biochemist, and together they would map out the structure and function of proteins. One of their projects was a collaboration funded by a grant to Sanders from the National Science Foundation. By the time Diao joined, the effort had already led to butyrate-kinase crystals — albeit of poor quality, Sanders said.
When Hasson died, Sanders — with his institution’s blessing — took control of her data. That made sense, since their labs had collaborated closely. Indeed, they occasionally shared post-docs, including Diao, who had started with Hasson on a project looking at a protein called butyrate kinase but then moved over to Sanders’ lab as the work evolved. Continue reading Journal retracts protein paper from scientist who misused deceased mentor’s data
Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal — and, if you are Yoshitaka Fujii, retraction.
We have seen retraction notices in two journals concerning papers by Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist who, according to an international group of editors, may ultimately lose some 190 publications to research fraud.
Otoloaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery last month had the following notice for a 2011 article titled “Antiemetic Efficacy of Low-Dose Midazolam in Patients Undergoing Thyroidectomy,” by Fujii and an M. Ikatura (who has not been accused of wrongdoing, as far as we know): Continue reading Fujii retractions mount
In 2011, Diederik Stapel, a Dutch researcher who at the time was a shining star in the world of social psychology, published an article in the British Journal of Social Psychology with the counter-intuitive claim that failure can sometimes be more emotionally gratifying than success.
We’re guessing this isn’t one of those times. As readers of this blog well know, Stapel has admitted to fabricating loads of data. The BJSP has now retracted the article.
Here’s the notice for the paper, which has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Brit psych journal retracts Stapel paper on the paradox of failure