A cancer researcher who admitted to faking data has pleaded guilty to attempted forgery in a case involving letters of recommendation he passed off as coming from his former supervisor.
Last year, Georgios Laliotis, a former postdoc at The Ohio State University, was charged with forgery for allegedly creating a fake email address with the name of his PI, Philip Tsichlis, and using it to send two letters of recommendation to prospective employers.
Laliotis was later indicted for identity fraud, forgery, and telecommunications fraud, and pleaded not guilty to each count.
Less than a year after he became dean of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Dentistry, an uncomfortable email landed in Russell Taichman’s inbox.
Overlapping and duplicated panels in one of Taichman’s 2005 papers were among a list of complaints relayed by the publisher of Cellular Signalling in the April 2020 correspondence – complaints which were publicly posted on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik.
“The substance of the complaint is image manipulation, which if true, would violate our publishing policies,” the email stated. “Please note that if we do not have an adequate and timely response, we may be forced to conclude that the allegations are truthful.”
Science has rescinded an expression of concern it issued one month ago after the authors provided data that “addressed concerns about the integrity of the paper.”
The article has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The journal is publishing the newly submitted data as a correction, as well as an editor’s note explaining the removal of the expression of concern. The new notice states:
An alumna of the lab of Carlo Croce, a high-profile cancer researcher at The Ohio State University with 14 retractions, has sued the institution over the results of its investigation that found she committed research misconduct.
Flavia Pichiorri is now a principal investigator with her own lab researching potential therapies for multiple myeloma at City of Hope – a cancer center that also owns Cancer Treatment Centers of America – in Duarte, Calif.
She worked at Ohio State from 2004-16, first as a postdoctoral researcher in Croce’s lab, then as a research scientist, and finally as an assistant professor of hematology. She has been a PI on grants that garnered millions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health since switching jobs.
An engineering researcher has stepped down from an editorial board at the request of a journal’s leadership following a sleuth’s comment on a Retraction Watch post linking him to paper mill activity.
Masoud Afrand, an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran, was, until recently, on the editorial board of the journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements. He also was listed on the website of Scientific Reports as a member of the journal’s editorial board in the subject of mechanical engineering.
He now has neither position. He has not responded to our requests for comment.
A journal for conference proceedings which published a duplicate article has updated the later version, after originally telling the researcher who noticed the duplication that the articles were different enough to warrant publishing both.
The article, titled “Production and storage of polarized H2, D2, and HD molecules,” was published twice in the journal Proceedings of Science, in 2018 and in 2019. The first version represented proceedings from a talk given at the 2017 XVII International Workshop on Polarized Sources, Targets & Polarimetry in Kaist, South Korea; the second was from the 23rd International Spin Physics Symposium in Ferrara, Italy, held in 2018.
The later version has minor differences from the first, including more technical details about the study’s methods.
PoS, which is run by the International School for Advanced Studies based in Trieste, Italy, functions as a repository for various conference proceedings. It is run by a small staff, and each submission is reviewed by an individual conference’s editorial board.
A researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted PoS after coming across the two nearly identical versions of “Production and storage of polarized H2, D2, and HD molecules.” A journal representative first told the researcher that the journal would investigate the situation, then that “the contributions differ sufficiently in order to warrant both their publication,” according to an email seen by Retraction Watch.
Last month, a millipede expert in Denmark received an email notifying him that one of his publications had been mentioned in a new manuscript on Preprints.org. But when the researcher, Henrik Enghoff, downloaded the paper, he learned that it cited his work for something off-topic.
Stranger still, the authors of the now-withdrawn preprint, a group of researchers in China and Africa, also referenced two papers by Enghoff that he knew he hadn’t written. It turned out they didn’t exist.
“I’ve never had anything like this happen before,” Enghoff, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, told Retraction Watch.
We previously reported that the corresponding author of the paper, Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Edwards School and chair of its department of clinical and translational science, told us he had contacted PLOS to request a correction to the article.
A pharmacy researcher who left the University of Pennsylvania sometime last year has been found guilty of research misconduct in multiple federal grant applications and five published papers, four of which have already been retracted.
As we have reported, William Armstead, who is retired from Penn, was working among other things on the effects of brain injury on piglets – experiments in which the animals were slaughtered. He has had seven papers retracted, and The Philadelphia Inquirerreported in September that he had left the university. Penn did not respond to several requests for comment when we attempted to reach officials there about Armstead’s work.
BMJ Open has retracted a paper describing a study in which people with diabetes will be switched from cigarettes to vaping after the journal learned – late in the process of publication – that the authors were indirectly funded by the tobacco company, Philip Morris International.
