Imperial College London has found that a former graduate student there — who had been found guilty of misconduct in two other institutions — did not commit fraud while at Imperial.
As first reported in the Times Higher Education today: Continue reading Imperial clears Jatinder Ahluwalia of misconduct, blames “protracted negotiation” with Novartis for delay
Irony alert: If you’re going to write articles about recurrent neural networks, make sure they don’t, well, recur.
The journal Neural Networks has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of researchers from Spain for publishing what amounted to a repeat of a 2011 article in a different but closely related journal. Scientific publishing, alas, is not like Hollywood, where remakes of movies and TV shows is not only acceptable, it seems to be the only flavor producers are willing to taste.
The article was titled “Hopf Bifurcation Stability in Hopfield Neural Networks” — Hopf, for those keeping score at home, is Eberhard Hopf, a famous (and politically controversial) mathematician and founder of something called ergodic theory — and it came from scientists at the University of La Laguna, in the Canary Islands.
According to the notice: Continue reading Neural Networks retracts rerun
We have knocked the Journal of Biological Chemistry in the past for what we believed to be needless — and unhelpful — obfuscation. And more recently, we have praised the journal for taking what we believe to be positive steps in the direction of greater transparency.
Here, again, we come not to bury JBC but to praise it.
The journal has issued a retraction for a 2011 article by a group of researchers in London, England, led by Stephen Perkins. The paper, “The solution structure of heparan sulfate differs from that of heparin,” purported to show that:
Continue reading Retraction of JBC heparan paper shows much to like
The Journal of Neuro-Oncology has retracted a 2009 article on brain tumors for what’s clearly plagiarism — but which is called everything but.
The article was titled “Glioma grading: sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of diffusion and perfusion imaging,” and it came from a group at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, in Trivandrum, India.
Here’s the — rather laughable — retraction notice, which dances around the matter about as deftly as a freshman with the prom queen:
Continue reading Retraction notice for cancer paper gives wide berth to the “p” word
Slate has retracted an essay they published as part of a partnership with Quora, an online question-and-answer site, after acknowledging that they “did not vet the piece properly.”
The piece garnered hundreds of comments, many of which questioned whether its claims were legit, and some of which pointed out that the author may have posted questionable material on the web before.
This now appears where the article, originally published at 5:01 p.m. on Thursday, July 25, originally did: Continue reading Slate retracts essay on whether doctors are biased against obese people
You’d have to be fairly literate to understand the phrase “breach of warranties,” so it’s a good thing it appears in a retraction notice for paper on literacy itself.
The 2012 article, “Information Literacy in Croatia: An Ideological Approach,” appeared in the Journal of Language, Identity & Education, a Taylor & Francis title. The authors were Melita Poler Kovačič, Nada Zgrabljić Rotar and Karmen Erjavec.
Here’s what the abstract had to say: Continue reading “Breach of warranties” leads to retraction of literacy paper
Alirio Melendez, who has already had 12 papers retracted from various journals and been found guilty of scientific misconduct by a former employer, has had a Science paper retracted.
Here’s the notice (which is behind a paywall): Continue reading Melendez Science paper retracted, making 13
The University of Tokyo panel investigating the work of a former professor there, Shigeaki Kato, has recommended the retraction of 43 of his group’s articles, according to a report in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
If the papers are indeed retracted, Kato, who already has at least five articles subject to an expression of concern and five retractions, would be fifth on the list of most retractions for a single author, by our unofficial tally. His fellow countryman, Yoshitaka Fujii, continues to hold the lead at what appears to be 183, followed by Joachim Boldt (~89), John Darsee (~83), and Diederik Stapel, at 53. [See note at end.]
The Asahi report quotes Kato — who has received some $20 million in government funding for his work — as acknowledging problems with the data in his studies: Continue reading Tokyo panel calls for retraction of 43 Kato papers
In our work here at Retraction Watch, we’ve seen a number of euphemisms for plagiarism. (See slides 18-22 of this presentation for a selection.) Today, in following up on a case we covered last month, we’ve learned of a new way to avoid saying the dreaded p-word.
We reported in June that sex researcher Willibrord Weijmar Schultz had retracted two papers. One was for “substantial overlap between this paper and an earlier published paper by Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum,” while the other was for “breach of warranties made by the authors with respect to originality” and failure to cite a dissertation.
Two more retractions from Weijmar Schultz, for exactly the same reasons as the second one above, have just appeared. One was of a 1991 paper in Sexual and Marital Therapy (now Sexual and Relationship Therapy), while the other was of a 2003 article in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.
The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy notice reads as follows: Continue reading What’s the difference between plagiarism and “unintended and unknowing breach of copyright?”
The journal Memory has retracted a paper on repressed sexual abuse after a protracted dispute between the authors and an institutional investigation in The Netherlands that led to no findings of misconduct against the first author, Elke Geraerts — a rising star in the field of social psychology. (The title of hers TEDx talk, by the way, is “Resilience as a key to success.”)
The article, titled “Linking thought suppression and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse,” was published in 2008 and has been cited 10 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Bad Memory? Repressed sexual abuse memory paper retracted for data inconsistencies