A paper about an alleged cheetah fossil from the Pliocene epoch, dogged by questions since its publication in 2008, has been retracted after one of the authors acknowledged it wasn’t what they thought it was.
Here’s the notice for the paper, “A primitive Late Pliocene cheetah, and evolution of the cheetah lineage:” Continue reading Author retracts PNAS paper about alleged Pliocene cheetah fossil that critics said was a fake
Today’s Retraction Watch, to paraphrase Sesame Street, is brought to you by the number 13.
Earlier, we reported on several retractions from Diederik Stapel that bring his total to that number, and now we’ve learned about number 13 for Dipak Das. Das is of course the UConn researcher who was found to have committed 145 counts of misconduct in his studies of the red wine compound resveratrol and other subjects.
Here’s the notice, from The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, for “Resveratrol, a unique phytoalexin present in red wine, delivers either survival signal or death signal to the ischemic myocardium depending on dose:” Continue reading Seeing red (wine): Another retraction for Dipak Das, making count 13
The retraction count is up to 13 for Dutch psychology fraudster Diederik Stapel, with four more in the publications the Journal of Consumer Research, Motivation & Emotion, Psychology & Marketing, and Social Cognition.
Here are the notices: Continue reading We’re up to 13: Retractions keep coming for Diederik Stapel
It has been a while since we heard about Joachim Boldt, the German anesthesiologist whose 90-odd retractions briefly put him at the top of the heap until Yoshitaka Fujii kicked him off earlier this year.
Now, Boldt’s former institution, the Klinikum Ludwigshafen, has released a report on its investigation into the disgraced critical care expert, and the results aren’t pretty. Here’s a press release about the report, in its entirety: Continue reading Boldt inquiry concludes: False findings in at least 10 studies, but no harm to patients
We apologize for what must seem like a constant drip, drip, drip, but we have three more retractions from Diederik Stapel to report, all from the European Journal of Social Psychology.
The first, in order of publication date, involves a 2006 paper by Stapel and co-author Camille Johnson — whose name has appeared on several other of Stapel’s retracted papers — titled “When nothing compares to me: How defensive motivations and similarity shape social comparison effects.”
The notice reads: Continue reading Three more retractions for Diederik Stapel
Earlier this year, we reported on the case of Robert Getzenberg of Johns Hopkins, who retracted a 2007 paper in Urology that was “at the center of two 2009 lawsuits brought by a company that funded the work.”
Getzenberg has now retracted a related paper, “Analysis of a serum test for prostate cancer that detects a second epitope of EPCA-2,” published in The Prostate in 2009 and cited nine times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
The notice in The Prostate goes further than the one in Urology, using the word “falsification:” Continue reading Another retraction for potential prostate cancer test from Hopkins
In May, we broke the story of Edward Shang, a weight loss surgeon who made up most, if not all, of the patients he reported on in at least one study. We’ve been following the case since then, including three more retractions in the Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (JPEN).
As we noted in a June 22 post, the notices in JPEN were a bit more lean than the first notice we found, in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases. The latter read: Continue reading Hmmm: SAGE’s attorney explains why weight loss retraction notices said less than those of other journals
A second psychology researcher has resigned after statistical scrutiny of his papers by another psychologist revealed data that was too good to be true.
Ed Yong, writing in Nature, reports that Lawrence Sanna, most recently of the University of Michigan, left his post at the end of May. That was several months after Uri Simonsohn, a University of Pennsylvania psychology researcher, presented Sanna, his co-authors, and Sanna’s former institution, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with evidence of “odd statistical patterns.”
Simonsohn is the researcher who also forced an investigation into the work of Dirk Smeesters, who resigned last month. Last week, Yong reported that Simonsohn had uncovered another case that hadn’t been made official yet.
According to today’s story, Sanna has asked the editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology — which is also retracting one of Smeesters’ papers — to retract three papers published from 2009 to 2011. These are the three he seems to have published there during that time: Continue reading University of Michigan psychologist resigns following concerns by statistical sleuth Simonsohn: Nature
This one’s like taking candy from a baby.
The Journal of Endodontics — or JOE — has retracted a 2011 article (its online date) on the prospects of tissue engineering for the mouth by a group of Chinese authors who appear to have tried to pass bogus data into print.
The paper was titled “Mineralized Tissue Formation by Bone Morphogenetic Protein-7–transfected Pulp Stem Cells“. According to the notice: Continue reading Pulp fiction: doubtful “veracity” leads to retraction of endodontics paper
The journal Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology has retracted a 2011 paper by an Italian nursing researcher who lifted text and data from a previously published work, and made up results to fill gaps, too.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Second helpings: Immunology journal retracts paper for plagiarism, then U Bari investigation reveals fraud