Category: faked data

Nearly 20 years after the publication of a paper on phytoestrogens in postmenopausal women, one of the authors said the study had never been performed, according to a recently published retraction notice.

The retraction is the second for two of the authors. It comes after sleuth Ben Mol and his colleagues initially discovered data similarities between the recently-retracted study and another by the same group, as we reported last year. 

The two papers that seem to share data appeared in Fertility and Sterility, an Elsevier publication, in 2004 and 2006. 

Continue reading Paper retracted after author told journal study was ‘not actually performed’

Last spring, the Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science published a provocative paper stating that left-handed mothers in Singapore treat their LGBTQ+ children better than do right-handed moms. 

Except the paper, “Left-Handed Mothers and LGBTQ+ Child Acceptance in Singapore: Exploring the Link through Early Life Rejection,” was fake, a sting, designed to cast shade on anti-gay science proliferating in Singapore. 

The data were fabricated, and so were the authors, Jin Rabak and Hen Guai Lan. Their purported employer, Simisai University? A bogus institution with a name concocted for laughs: in Singaporean English, “simisai” means “what the shit.” 

Continue reading The Singapore Sting: Why an activist published a fake paper on ‘LGBTQ+ child acceptance’

A former graduate student at Georgia Tech who at least until recently worked at Shell confessed last year to misconduct in three published papers.

Michael Casciato, who earned his doctorate  from Georgia Tech in 2013, wrote in a June 22, 2020 email to the editor of an American Chemical Society journal as well as the principal investigator of the lab where he completed his PhD, Martha Grover, and a co-author, Dennis Hess:

Continue reading Exclusive: Shell employee confesses to graduate student misdeeds

Kyoto University has fired a researcher after determining that he committed fraud in at least five papers about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake of 2006.

In a report released earlier this week (Sept 28), the institution said it found Aiming Lin guilty of 37 counts of “fraudulent activity” in four of the articles, not including a 2017 paper Lin published in Science which the journal retracted in 2019. The university suspended Lin for a year at the time.

Kyoto University said (courtesy of Google translate) earlier this month Lin was subject to “disciplinary dismissal” in the case:  

Continue reading Kyoto University fires researcher for fraud in Kumamoto earthquake studies

Talk about a brutal retraction notice.

The Journal of Translational Medicine has retracted a 2017 paper after multiple investigations into the work concluded that the data were fabricated. At least two of the authors hotly dispute that conclusion, as you’ll see. [Warning: Colorful language ahead.]

The study,  “Stromal vascular fraction cells for the treatment of critical limb ischemia: a pilot study,” came from a group of researchers in Lithuania led by Adas Darinskas. At the time of publication, Darinskas listed his affiliation as the National Cancer Institute of Lithuania, in Vilnius. Now he works at Innovita Research, a company trying to develop:

Continue reading Retraction notice claims authors submitted ‘fictional’ science

A group of software engineers from academia and industry has lost a 2017 paper on web-based applications over concerns that the data were fabricated.

The article, “Facilitating debugging of web applications through recording reduction,” appeared online in May 2017 in Empirical Software Engineering, a Springer publication.

According to the retraction notice, which was released in December: Continue reading “Evidence of fabricated data” leads to retraction of paper on software engineering