A researcher who agreed to a dozen years of supervision for NIH-funded research was fired from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at the end of 2019, Retraction Watch has learned.
As we reported last week, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that the researcher, Hui (Herb) Bin Sun, and a colleague, Daniel Leong, faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications going back to 2013. The ORI findings are dated March 21, 2022.
This conference abstract, about the Internet of things and blockchain for smart cities, for instance, cites 44 references to Corchado’s own papers out of a total of 322 references. While this conference abstract, presented to a conference about artificial intelligence in educational technology in Wuhan, China, in July 2021, contains the exact same references as the one about blockchain for smart cities.
An alleged sex researcher with a history of making things up has lost a 2019 paper on the habits of people who have sex with animals over concerns about the ethics approval for the research.
The paper, “Digital Ethnography of Zoophilia — A Multinational Mixed-Methods Study,” was written by Damian Jacob Sendler and a co-author, Michal Lew-Starowicz and appeared in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.
serial fabulist. The accomplished doctor character Sendler has created has appeared in numerous media outlets—Vice, Playboy, Savage Lovecast, Huffington Post, Insider, Bustle, Thrive Global, Women’s Health, and Forbes, among others. Many of these platforms have published Sendler’s lies and publicized his bizarre and irresponsible studies on necrophilia, zoophilia, lethal erotic asphyxiation, and sexual assault. And until recently, he was soliciting patients through his website where he offered online psychotherapy and sex therapy.
Sendler, whose affiliation is listed as the Felnett Health Research Foundation, in Staten Island, N.Y., claims to have earned an MD and a PhD from Harvard:
When Marianne Alunno-Bruscia, the research integrity officer at France’s national oceanographic science institute, uncovered nearly a dozen papers with fraudulent authorship, she thought she’d stumbled on something bizarre.
She didn’t know how right she was.
As we reported in early February, the problems arose during an audit the research activities of the L’Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (iFREMER), which the organization was conducting to satisfy a request from the French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education – a bureaucratic headache, to be sure, but one which in this case proved well worthwhile.
The bibliographic deep-dive turned up two curious articles bearing the name of Bertrand Chapron. That part wasn’t unusual. Chapron, a wave researcher, is prolific. Odd was the nature of the two papers. Neither was in Chapron’s fields of interest. Chapron disavowed any involvement in the work, and insisted that he’d never met the two main authors of the articles: Tim Chen and C.Y.J. Chen.
A pair of researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications for six years starting in 2013, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
According to the ORI, Daniel Leong, a former lab tech at Einstein,
intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsified and/or fabricated Western blot and histological image data for chronic deep tissue conditions including osteoarthritis (OA) and tendinopathy in murine models by reusing image data, with or without manipulating them to conceal their similarities, and falsely relabeling them as data representing different experiments in fifty (50) figures included in sixteen (16) PHS grant applications. In the absence of reliable image data, the figures, quantitative data in associated graphs purportedly derived from those images, statistical analyses, and related text also are false.
A former University of California, Berkeley postdoc in physics “engaged in research misconduct in research reported in a grant application” submitted to the NIH, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
The postdoc, Shuo Chen, “reused an image of visual cortex neurons to represent fluorescence calcium imaging of hippocampal neurons,” the ORI said. Chen, who was awarded the 2019 Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation for this essay published in Science, also used data from a 2018 Nature Neuroscience paper he co-authored while at the RIKEN Institute in Japan “to represent several sessions of two-photon hippocampal calcium imaging of progressive place fields, obtained from multiple mice running on a treadmill in a head-fixed VR set up.”
The authors of a study suggesting that a deep freeze might help reverse one of the curious complications of COVID-19 have put their paper on ice after determining that they lacked adequate ethics approval for the research.
The randomized study looked at the effect of cryotherapy in 45 people whose sense of smell had been disrupted by COVID. Two-thirds received either high- or low-dose cryotherapy – which Legrand’s team defined as exposure to “extremely low temperatures (−60°C to −110°C) in a double Cryoair chamber (MECOTEC, Pforzheim, Germany) for 3 min” – while a third were assigned to a control group.
According to the investigators, whose affiliations included the French Society of Whole-Body Cryotherapy — and who nonetheless registered their protocol in the Iranian Registry of Clinical Trials:
A group of researchers at the University of Chicago has asked a Nature journal to retract a paper after PubPeer commenters pointed out numerous duplicated images in the article.
A JAMA journal has retracted and replaced a widely circulated 2021 paper which purported to find that pot use among adolescents drops when states make the drug legal.
A September 2021 study of high school use between 1993 and 2019 used the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to determine that adult-use laws did not increase teen use. After two years, states with adult-use laws saw decreases in usage.
But as readers soon pointed out, the findings were schwag. According to the notice:
Terry Magnuson, the vice chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school, has resigned from that post two days after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity said that he had admitted to plagiarizing text in an NIH grant application.
As we reported March 8, Magnuson
“engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarizing text” from two guides, material from a company that makes sequencing kits, and a review article, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
Magnuson did not respond to our requests for comment earlier this week about whether the finding would have any effect on his positions at UNC. But in a letter today to the “Carolina Community,” chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and provost and chief academic officer J. Christopher Clemens wrote:
