by reason for retraction – Page 54

Disgraced Korea scholar, formerly of Columbia, loses paper for plagiarism

A former historian at Columbia University who resigned last year in the wake of a plagiarism scandal involving his award-winning book on North Korea has lost a 2005 paper for misusing his sources.

In 2017, Charles Armstrong, once a leading figure in Korean scholarship, returned the 2014 John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Society after allegations emerged that he had plagiziared widely in his book, “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”

At the time, Armstrong admitted to having made “citation errors” in the work. However, Balazs Szalontai, an academic in Korea, insisted that the the errors were in fact plagiarism and that they were sweeping.

Now, in what Szalotai told us was the earliest instance of Armstrong’s plagiarism that he has found, the journal Cold War History is retracting an article by Armstrong. According to the notice:

Michigan State committee finds misconduct by museum head in celebrated mummy case

An investigation into the director of the museum at Michigan State University has found him guilty of research misconduct and other behavior stemming from his meddling in efforts to repatriate a 500-year-old mummy of a young girl that came to the school from South America in the late 19th century.

A committee at the East Lansing institution determined that Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and historian misappropriated the work of other scholars, fabricated data and committed other misconduct in his handling of the mummy matter, which made headlines last year.

Although the case involves several years of misbehavior, at its core are two main events: a repatriation ceremony in Washington, D.C. for the relic, and an official letter in which Auslander, as director of the museum published the ill-gotten work.

According to a summary of the report provided to Retraction Watch which is consistent with official communications viewed by us:

Former grad student forges his supervisor’s authorship — and gets smacked down

On December 29, Jan Behrends, of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, was checking his Google Scholar profile when he saw his name on a paper — one he’d played no part in writing.

The article, “Microelectrochemical cell arrays for whole-cell currents recording through ion channel proteins based on trans-electroporation approach,” had appeared earlier that month in Analyst, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry. According to Behrends:

Journal expresses concern about possible animal abuse in trauma paper

A journal has issued an expression of concern over a 2018 paper which involved strapping 21 anesthetized minipigs to sleds and running them into a wall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.

The study, “Experimental study of thoracoabdominal injuries suffered from caudocephalad impacts using pigs,” came from the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China, and was funded by the People’s Liberation Army.

About those impacts. The purpose of the study, according to the abstract, was this:

Authors questioning papers at nearly two dozen journals in wake of spider paper retraction

Talk about a tangled web.

The retraction earlier this month of a 2016 paper in the American Naturalist by Kate Laskowski and Jonathan Pruitt turns out to be the tip of what is potentially a very large iceberg.

This week, the researchers have retracted a second paper, this one in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for the same reasons — duplicated data without a reasonable explanation.

Dan Bolnick, the editor of the American Naturalist, tells us:

Digging deeper: Authors retract soil paper so “the error we made does not propagate”

The authors of a 2018 paper on how much carbon soil can store have retracted the work after concluding that their analysis was fatally flawed.

The article, “Soil carbon stocks are underestimated in mountainous regions,” appeared in the journal Geoderma. Its authors are affiliated with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.

According to the abstract of the paper:

Has reproducibility improved? Introducing the Transparency and Rigor Index

Some Retraction Watch readers may recall that back in 2012, we called, in The Scientist, for the creation of a Transparency Index. Over the years, we’ve had occasional interest from others in that concept, and some good critiques, but we noted at the time that we did not have the bandwidth to create it ourselves. We hoped that it would plant seeds for others, whether directly or indirectly.

With that in mind, we present a guest post from Anita Bandrowski, who among other things leads an initiative designed to help researchers identify their reagents correctly and has written for Retraction Watch before. She and colleagues have just posted a preprint titled “Rigor and Transparency Index, a new metric of quality for assessing biological and medical science methods” in which they describe “an automated tool developed to review the methods sections of manuscripts for the presence of criteria associated with the NIH and other reporting guidelines.”

Science seems to publish many things that may be true or interesting — but perhaps not both. Ideally all of science should be both true and interesting, and if we were to choose one, my hope would be to choose true over interesting.

‘I’m starting the year off with something I didn’t expect to ever do: I’m retracting a paper.’

In journalism, we often joke that three cases of a phenomenon is a trend. If that’s the case, the trend of late 2019 and early 2020 would appear to be authors announcing retractions on Twitter.

In December, Joscha Legewie took to social media to say he had been made aware of an error that had caused him to retract a just-published paper on police shootings and the health of black infants. Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold did something similar just a few weeks ago.

And now, the authors of a 2016 study on the social networks of spiders have retracted the paper after finding irreconcilable problems with their data — and the first author tweeted about it.

In doing so, she was following in the foosteps of the editor in chief of the journal that published the paper, who had himself retracted a paper several years ago. Read on for more.

Author ‘still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity’ after a reviewer steals his work

A group of researchers in France has lost a 2019 paper in Cell Calcium because one of the authors took, um, a bit too much inspiration for the work from a manuscript he’d reviewed for another publication.

The article, “TRPV6 calcium channel regulation, downstream pathways, and therapeutic targeting in cancer,” was written by a team from the Laboratory of Excellence Ion Channel Science and Therapeutics at the University of Lille. The senior author of the paper was V’yacheslav Lehen’kyi.

Or, maybe it was John Stewart, of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

As the retraction notice states:

Former UMass post-doc faked data, says federal watchdog

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has found a former post-doc at the University of Massachusetts Medical School guilty of misconduct stemming from falsification of data.

The finding comes more than two years after a retraction referred to an investigation at U Mass. The ORI said Ozgur Tataroglu, who worked as a neurobiologist at the institution, doctored data in a published paper and two federal grant proposals. The 2015 paper, which appeared in Cell, was retracted in 2017. Tataroglu refused to sign the notice, which stated:

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