Stem Cells and Development has retracted a paper it published earlier this year after the leader of the study reported that the data were unreliable.
The paper, “Derivation and Genetic Modification of Embryonic Stem Cells from Disease-Model Inbred Rat Strains,” came from the lab of Aron Geurts, of the Medical College of Wisconsin.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Embryonic stem cell paper retracted for fabrication
A stem cell journal is retracting a paper by Gerold Feuer, a researcher at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse who was also found to have misused grants.
The Feuer story is complicated. Heralded in 2008 for landing $6.2 million in grants from the New York Stem Cell Board, Feuer was suspended in October 2010 while the university investigated allegations he had misused funds, specifically to funnel state dollars to HuMurine, a company he founded in 2008. In December 2010, Upstate said they had found evidence he had committed 53 acts of financial misconduct, and dismissed him.
From an August 2012 court ruling on a case Feuer brought to fight that dismissal: Continue reading Retraction appears for stem cell researcher found to have used funds for his company’s gain
We have a fourth retraction in the Journal of Biochemistry for Naohito Aoki, a Japanese researcher and former postdoc in a German lab, whose images have been called into question but whose retraction notices were scant. In this case, however, the journal, while not exactly overbrimming with information about the article, at least gives us some sense of what’s going on.
Aoki worked in the lab of Axel Ullrich, of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and appeared on two retracted articles in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) with his mentor, along with a third with a co-author from Japan, Tsukasa Matsuda. Although those notices don’t say anything about the reason for the retractions — this was before the JBC started providing such information — Ulrich told us that Aoki had been manipulating images. Continue reading Aoki notches fourth retraction for image problems
Chemical Engineering Journal has retracted a 2011 article from a group of researchers in Portugal after determining that the scientists made up their data.
The clincher: According to the journal, the researchers did not possess the proper lab equipment to perform the study as reported.
The article, “Detoxification of high-strength liquid pollutants in an ozone bubble column reactor: Gas–liquid flow patterns, interphase mass transfer and chemical depuration,” appeared in August 2011 and was written by Rodrigo J. G. Lopes and Rosa M. Quinta-Ferreira, from the Group on Environmental, Reaction and Separation Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Coimbra. The paper has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, both times by the original authors.
Here’s what the abstract has to say about the work: Continue reading Second retraction for chemist from Portugal who forged names, data
A researcher at Shanxi Normal University in China has notched two retractions, once for plagiarism and one for duplication.
Here’s the most recent notice, which appeared in Chemical Physics Letters on September 25: Continue reading Chemist loses two papers, one each for plagiarism and duplication
Like Howard Beale, the character in 1976’s “Network” who famously said “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!,” the editors of the journal Cortex have decided they’ve had enough when it comes to plagiarism.
From an editorial in the current issue:
We will treat academic plagiarism as a misdeed, not as a mistake, and a paper that plagiarizes others will be immediately rejected and may be reported to the author’s academic affiliation.
The editors explain how: Continue reading Neuroscience journal takes tough stance on plagiarism
Alan Sokal’s influence has certainly been felt strongly recently. Last month, a critique by Sokal — who in 1996 got a fake paper published in Social Text — and two colleagues forced a correction of a much-ballyhooed psychology paper. A few days after that, we reported on a Serbian Sokal hoax-like paper whose authors cited the scholarly efforts of one B. Sagdiyev, a.k.a. Borat.
And today, we bring you news of an effort by John Bohannon, of Science magazine, to publish fake papers in more than 300 open access journals. Bohannon, writing as “Ocorrafoo Cobange” of the “Wassee Institute of Medicine” — neither of which exist, of course — explains his process: Continue reading Science reporter spoofs hundreds of open access journals with fake papers
Irony alert: If you’re going to publish a paper on purportedly new molecules, please try to make sure those substances are indeed novel. Here’s case were that wasn’t quite so.
The Journal of Saudi Chemical Society has retracted a 2011 paper by a researcher who lifted the entire article from a previously published paper by someone else.
The paper in question, “Synthesis and antimicrobial activity of some new quinazolin-4(3H)-one derivatives,” came from Adnan Kadi at Kind Saud University in Riyadh. But according to the retraction notice, only a few words in that title — “some” and “quinazolin” were accurate. “New,” certainly not. (We suppose “derivatives” hits the mark, but for the wrong reason.) Continue reading Saudi journal retracts paper on new chemicals for being, well, not new
We don’t usually cover “pretractions” (see #5 for why), but our friend Larry Husten over at Forbes has a story today about what appears to be a dead paper walking.
The article, in Heart, comes from a group of prominent researchers in Italy who have been arrested for possibly failing to adequately consent their patients, among other potential misdeeds.
According to Husten, the 2010 article in question, “A randomised trial of target-vessel versus multi-vessel revascularisation in ST-elevation myocardial infarction: major adverse cardiac events during long-term follow-up,” by Maria Grazia Modena (a past president of the Italian Society of Cardiology) and colleagues, may have been grossly misrepresented to the journal. Continue reading Cardiac arrestees: Questions surface about Heart paper from Italian group that faces charges
A pair of authors from Italy has retracted their 2012 article in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine for including chunks of text with a “high degree of similarity” from other published sources. But rest assured: the authors, we’re told, didn’t intend to do so.
The article, “Central venous catheterization and thrombosis in newborns: update on diagnosis and management,” appeared in a supplemental issue of the journal covering the proceedings of the XVIII Congress of the Italian Society of Neonatology.
According to the retraction notice (which, we’re told, was inadvertently behind a pay wall until we asked for it): Continue reading Virtually verbatim text earns retraction of neonate paper, gives authors a pass