It’s getting hard to keep up. A day ago, we noted that Diederik Stapel’s retraction count had risen to 38. But later in the day, we heard about number 39, from the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Here’s the notice for “Making sense of war: Using the interpretation comparison model to understand the Iraq conflict”: Continue reading The 39 retractions: Stapel’s count rises again
If you’re a journal editor or publisher, there’s a good chance your email inbox has seen its share of emails from “Clare Francis,” who has been crusading against text and image duplication in papers for some years now. Some editors have grown quite weary of those emails, sometimes because they don’t want to deal with anonymous whistleblowers, and sometimes because they have found Clare’s claims to be without merit.
But the Journal of Cellular Biology is one journal that has apparently continued to take them seriously. Today, they retract “Follistatin induction by nitric oxide through cyclic GMP: a tightly regulated signaling pathway that controls myoblast fusion,” a 2006 paper about which Francis first raised concerns in early November. Here’s the notice, one of those wonderfully detailed ones that make us squeal like schoolgirls meeting the Beatles: Continue reading Clare Francis scores a bullseye: Journal of Cell Biology paper retracted for image manipulation
Partial retractions — as opposed corrections or the full monty — are unusual events in scientific publishing. But they appear to come in twos.
The journal Infection and Immunity, the work of whose editor, Ferric Fang, is much admired by this blog, has a fascinating example of the breed in its February issue.
The article in question, by a group from the University of Kentucky in Lexington led by Susan Straley, appeared online in 2007. It was titled “yadBC of Yersinia pestis, a New Virulence Determinant for Bubonic Plague,” and, as the words suggest, involved a gene marker for the virulence of plague. Or so it initially seemed.
But according to the partial retraction, the researchers are walking back one of their main claims. Consider: Continue reading Plague paper partially retracted
Diederik Stapel’s 35th through 38th retractions have appeared, all in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Two of the notices — for “The self salience model of other-to-self effects: Integrating principles of self-enhancement, complementarity, and imitation” (cited 31 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge) and “Distinguishing stereotype threat from priming effects: On the role of the social self and threat-based concerns” (cited 20 times) — read as follows: Continue reading Stapel retraction count rises to 38
Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that many of the people whose fraud we write about are men. Certainly, the top retraction earners — Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Naoki Mori, to name a few — all have a Y chromosome. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our sample size is representative.
Now along comes a study of U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) reports suggesting that men are in fact overrepresented among scientists who commit fraud. In a study published online today in mBio, Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall — whose names will also be familiar to Retraction Watch readers for their previous work — along with Joan Bennett analyzed 228 ORI reports since 1994, and found that 149 — or 65% — were male. (The vast majority of the 228 cases — 94% — involved fraud such as falsification or fabrication, while the others presumably involved misconduct such as plagiarism.)
And it’s not just that there are more men in the life sciences. At every stage of a life science career, the percentage of males found by the ORI to have committed misconduct was higher than the percentage of male life scientists overall: Continue reading Are men more likely to commit scientific fraud?
Jesús A. Lemus, he of the likely ghost author and questionable data, has earned his sixth retraction, this one in Biology Letters.
Here’s the notice for “Stress associated with group living in a long-lived bird:” Continue reading Retraction six appears for Jesús Angel Lemus
Clinics in Perinatology has a rather intriguing retraction.
The paper in question was a June 2012 review by a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco’s division of pediatric surgery, titled “Maternal-Fetal Surgery: History and General Considerations.”
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Look ma, no guidelines! Paper on unpublished fetal surgery recommendations retracted
A top cardiology researcher, Robert Hegele, of the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, has retracted a 15-year-old review after editors were made aware that it was “very similar” to another of his reviews.
Here’s the December 2012 notice for the paper, which has been cited 23 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Duplication leads to retraction of 1997 paper on heart disease genes
A group of authors have retracted a Cell paper describing a mouse model of autism because of image problems.
The senior author on the paper — there were 22 altogether — is Paul Worley of Johns Hopkins. Here’s the notice for “Enhanced Polyubiquitination of Shank3 and NMDA Receptor in a Mouse Model of Autism:” Continue reading Neuroscientists retract Cell autism model paper for “improperly assembled” figures
Yesterday, we reported on two retractions in the Journal of Neuroscience whose notices referred to a University of Lisbon report that had determined there was “substantial data misrepresentation” in the original articles. The notice didn’t say anything about misconduct, but when we see “misrepresentation,” we tend to think — as do many others — that there had been funny business.
But we heard back this morning from the senior author of the study, Ana M. Sebastião, and there’s a lot more to this story. It turns out that the University of Lisbon committee that wrote the report concluded, unanimously, that Continue reading University of Lisbon investigation that spawned neuroscience retractions found no evidence of misconduct