Worried about scarce research funding? Does the prospect of paying rent on that meager post-doc salary keep you up at night? Fear no more!
Innoscience Research in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to the rescue.
The company has launched an innovative (read: shady) scheme to pay researchers to cite studies from several journals it controls. How much can you earn? That depends. The payout is structured this way: $6 a citation and up to five cites, or $30, per paper, or $150 in total across all five journals.
A paper that sought to bring some math to the idea that the spread of COVID-19 could be tracked in human excrement has been retracted because of the authors submitted it to two different Elsevier journals on the same day — and because of some eyebrow-raising behavior by the alleged peer reviewers.
The first author of the article was Ernestine Atangana, a researcher in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein.
The article, “Will the extraction of COVID-19 from wastewater help flatten the curve?,” appeared in Chemosphere in May — where it caught the eye of a researcher in the field (who did not want to be identified) who was struck by its sheer awfulness. (We should note that others have explored the same idea, and come to mixed conclusions.)
Among the more risible sections, the researcher told us, was this:
What do aerobics and dance training have to do with geology?
If that sounds like an odd question, take a look at more than 70 articles in a special collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, published by Springer Nature, with titles such as:
A law firm known for filing shareholder suits says that data supporting a drug company’s plan for trials of its experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease show evidence of manipulation.
Stock in the company, Cassava Biosciences, tumbled yesterday after the FDA posted material from the firm, Labaton Sucharow, and a top research integrity expert tells Retraction Watch he sees near-certain signs of fabrication in the data.
Earlier this week, Labaton Sucharow submitted a “citizen’s petition” to the FDA regarding a regulatory filing from Cassava, and called on the agency to halt trials of Cassava’s drug simulfilam on the grounds that it had:
As Jason Isbell sings, doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do. But sometimes it’s even harder than it needs to be. Ask Cory Xian.
When Xian, a bone researcher at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide, and his colleagues found an error in their 2018 paper inthe Journal of Bone and Mineral Research — a top journal for the field — they notified the editors and asked for a retraction. But the journal demurred, instead issuing a correction for the article, titled “Release of CXCL12 From Apoptotic Skeletal Cells Contributes to Bone Growth Defects Following Dexamethasone Therapy in Rats.”
The correction states that “incorrect photos had been accidentally and mistakenly used by a staff person as representative photos”.
A group of researchers in Canada who’d collaborated with a one-time rising star in the bone field have retracted a 2014 article after determining that the data were unreliable.
They did so even though the paper was not a focus of the investigations into the work of Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, whose once sparkling career in endocrinology crumbled after an investigation found that she had fabricated data and took elaborate steps to cover her deception — from doctoring patient records to changing the temperature of a freezer at a government blood facility to damage samples that might reveal the fraud.
A marketing journal is taking heat on social media for issuing an expression of concern over a 2019 paper that many readers believe should have been retracted — and correcting another instead of retracting it.
The article now subject to an expression of concern, “Role of Ambient Temperature in Influencing Willingness to Pay in Auctions and Negotiations,” was written by Jayati Sinha, who holds the Macy’s Retailing Professorship at Florida International University and Rajesh Bagchi, of Virginia Tech University.
We have a confession right up front: You won’t meet the man — a man who claims to be a brain surgeon, no less — we refer to in the headline.
That is because, dear reader, we were not able to contact the person who publishes under the name Michael George Zaki Ghali.
What we do know is that someone using Ghali’s name bought two fake web domains for the Karolinska Institutet to make it look as though he was affiliated with the world-famous medical center and published seven dozen papers in peer reviewed journals owned by Elsevier, IMR Press, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. So far, seven those articles have now been retracted, by our count, including recently a 2020 paper in Acta Cardiologica that included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer as a co-author. [See an update on this post.]
A former researcher at the Mount Desert Island Laboratory in Maine who co-founded a lab spinoff faked data in research supported by federal funding, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
The researcher, Viravuth Yin, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data,” the ORI said in an announcement about the case. The work was published and submitted from 2015 to 2019, and Yin was principal investigator on one of the grants named by the ORI, worth more than $900,000.
A cancer researcher once involved in a federal research integrity probe has repeatedly been denied funding and other sources of income, according to his attorney, who blamed our coverage of the case for the scientist’s continuing woes and asked us to remove a post.
Our coverage of the work of Sam W. Lee goes back to 2013. But it was our reporting in April 2019 that Lee — once a member of the Harvard faculty — was the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity that was the subject of the attorney’s letter. ORI has yet to announce a conclusion in its inquiry, which appears to have reached a finding before we posted on the matter. He has at least five retractions — including two that appeared after April 2019 — and two expressions of concern.
One of those expressions of concern was for a 2000 paper in Molecular and Cellular Biology titled“Overexpression of Kinase-Associated Phosphatase (KAP) in Breast and Prostate Cancer and Inhibition of the Transformed Phenotype by Antisense KAP Expression.”
The disposition of that article, published by the American Society for Microbiology, like the ORI inquiry, remains unclear.
In a letter dated August 12, attorney Steven Seinberg, who is based in Los Angeles, claimed that since our April 2019 post, Lee has struggled both personally and professionally:
