Category: by reason for retraction

Montenegro’s science minister accused of plagiarism

vlahovic
Sanja Vlahovic

Sanja Vlahovic, science minister of Montenegro, copied two-thirds of a 2010 paper on tourism from previously published work by other academics, according to the national daily newspaper Vijesti.

The newspaper compared her paper, “Destinations’ Competitiveness in Modern Tourism,” presented at the Tourism & Hospitality Management 2010 conference in Opatija, Croatia, to three previously published papers and found much of the content to be identical, without the minister acknowledging two of those papers in the bibliography. Continue reading Montenegro’s science minister accused of plagiarism

Wrong in the tooth: Faked data, authorship issues force retraction of dental paper

cridCase Reports in Dentistry has pulled a 2014 article about an oral parasitic infection (caution: not pretty) after learning that the authors were not exactly honest about their work.

Here’s the abstract of the paper, “Rhinosporidiosis of the Parotid Duct”: Continue reading Wrong in the tooth: Faked data, authorship issues force retraction of dental paper

Dissertation in transition: Plagiarism leads to delisting of education thesis, lost PhD

ccjThe author of a doctoral dissertation on veterans education has lost the paper — and a mention of the work in a roster of theses — because he lifted text from a previously published dissertation from a student at another institution.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Dissertation in transition: Plagiarism leads to delisting of education thesis, lost PhD

Chemical engineering journal retracts paper with unknowing author

AiChemE-logoAIChemE’s website promises, “Subscribing to the AIChE Journal is like having access to nine topical journals in the field.”

Without a subscription, though, you might miss out on some valuable topical information – like why a paper you want to cite has been retracted, something the Committee on Publication Ethics recommends be freely available.

Here’s the notice for “Flow Structure and Particle Motions in a Gas-Polyethylene Fluidized Bed,” originally published in 2007:

Continue reading Chemical engineering journal retracts paper with unknowing author

Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal

jvcWhen we heard about this retraction, we were forced to ask: Are there any articles left in Journal of Vibration & Control?

The publication was forced to retract 60 papers by the same author in July, after he was caught exploiting a technological loophole to review his own papers.

Now, papers on loading cargo ships has been felled by a much less tech-savvy method: Two authors submitted a paper to both Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems and the Journal of Vibration & Control, both of which accepted and published the paper.

The authors, Yousef M. Al-Sweiti and Dirk Soeffker, have now lost three papers in total. Here’s the joint notice from SAGE and Taylor & Francis (we’ve added links to relevant retractions): Continue reading Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal

Fudged figures sink breast cancer paper

oncogeneA prestigious cancer journal has pulled an article over “concerns” regarding some of the figures, which PubPeer commenters had tagged as suspect.

A few weeks after the paper was published on June 9, comments on PubPeer began accumulating. Commenters called out both potentially manipulated and repeated images. The exact timeline is not clear, because Oncogene does not list a date on the retraction notice, but by August 29 the paper had been retracted.

Here’s the notice for “IL-6 secreted by cancer-associated fibroblasts induces tamoxifen resistance in luminal breast cancer,” by researchers at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine and Ruijin Hospital, both in Shanghai, China, and the University of Michigan: Continue reading Fudged figures sink breast cancer paper

87% of bugs resistant to antibiotics? Not so fast, as staph paper yanked after staff mistake

What could have been a truly scary study about drug resistant staph infections in hospitals has been retracted due to a lab error.

6.coverResearchers at a community hospital in Pittsburgh claimed that the commonly quoted 3% rate of staph that is resistant to ceftriaxone and sensitive to methicillin was drastically understated. However, an “honest error in the interpretation of a key lab test” called the findings into question.

Here’s the abstract: Continue reading 87% of bugs resistant to antibiotics? Not so fast, as staph paper yanked after staff mistake

Authors retract PNAS brain genetics paper for statistical issues

pnas 1113The authors of a paper on brain genetics published online in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) are retracting it for “a potential confound relating to statistical inference.”

Here’s the notice for “Identification of gene ontologies linked to prefrontal–hippocampal functional coupling in the human brain:” Continue reading Authors retract PNAS brain genetics paper for statistical issues

Tonic-clonic stats error sinks epilepsy paper

pm_cover_dez_01A brain imaging study in children with epilepsy has been retracted by the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging due to a statistics error.

Here’s the notice for “Microstructural Brain Abnormalities of Children of Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsy With Generalized Tonic-Clonic Seizure: A Voxel-Based Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging Study”: Continue reading Tonic-clonic stats error sinks epilepsy paper

Retraction appears for psychiatrist sought for arrest in alleged fraud scheme

malafosse
Alain Malafosse, via University of Geneva

Want bogus data, million-dollar fraud allegations and a scientist on the lam? We give you Alain Malafosse.

The British Journal of Psychiatry has retracted a June 2013 paper by Malafosse and his colleagues on the genetics of bipolar disorder in children because Malafosse allegedly fabricated key data in the study.

The article, “Childhood maltreatment and methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1 in bipolar disorder,” purported to find that people with bipolar disorder who had experienced more, and more severe, abuse early in life were more likely to show epigenetic changes. According to the abstract:

Continue reading Retraction appears for psychiatrist sought for arrest in alleged fraud scheme