Here’s some friendly advice. If you’re going to publish a paper titled “In Vitro Studies for Resistance to Anthracnose Disease (Colletotrichum gloeosporioides Penz.) in Different Mango Hybrid Seedlings,” make sure the article is in fact, well…different.
A U.K. urban planner and self-styled expert on “truth and lying” has launched a forceful attack on the ethics of a key trade association, accusing it of refusing to promote his work for fear that the findings might be damaging to the profession.
And what, you’re asking, does this have to do with retractions? Trust us. This story’s harder to follow than a New Jersey left turn ramp — but we think you’ll enjoy it.
Today brings two journal editorials about misconduct and retractions. They take, if we may, a bit of an optimistic and perhaps even blindered approach.
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.
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.”
The FASEB Journal has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), looking at the role of a tumor-suppressing micro-RNA in pulmonary fibrosis. The retraction suggests the provenance of the data are in question, and we learned details of what went wrong.
A paper that shares a first author with a paper retracted in December has been corrected.
Late last year, we reported on a retraction in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling (ARDS) by Indika Edirisinghe, who was at the University of Rochester when the original paper was published, and colleagues. On January 17, the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry published a correction to “Effect of Black Currant Anthocyanins on the Activation of Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (eNOS) in Vitro in Human Endothelial Cells,” on which Edirisinghe is also first author.
Last year, an audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found “a potential for unnecessary duplication” among the billions of dollars in research grants funded by national agencies. Some researchers, it seemed, could be winning more than one grant to do the same research.
Prompted by that report, Virginia Tech’s Skip Garner and his colleagues used eTBLAST, which Garner invented, to review more than 630,000 grant applications submitted to the NIH, NSF, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, “the largest charitable funder of breast cancer research in the United States.” The approach was not unlike those by publishers to identify potential article duplications.
In a Comment published today inNature, they report that they found 1,300 applications above a “similarity score” cutoff of 0.8 for federal agencies, and 0.65 for Komen documents — “with 1 indicating identical text in two same-length documents, and more than 1 representing identical text in one piece that is longer than the other.”
Vitro Studies for Resistance to Anthracnose Disease (Colletotrichum gloeosporioides Penz.) in Different Mango Hybrid Seedlings,” make sure the article is in fact, well…different.
