A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.
Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:
Retraction Watch readers may recall the name Alexander Neumeister.
In 2016, The New York Times reported on his dismissal from the New York University School of Medicine following claims of misconduct in a trial Neumeister was running.
A lot has happened in the case since, including embezzlement charges for which he pleaded guilty. Now, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity has found that Neumeister also committed research misconduct.
Continue reading Psychiatrist who stole grant funds also engaged in research misconduct, says ORI
We’ve seen authors fake peer review by creating fake email addresses, and even companies that use photos of celebrities to lure unsuspecting authors. Now along comes a new scam, this one involving special issues of journals. In “Predatory publishing, hijacking of legitimate journals and impersonation of researchers via special issue announcements: a warning for editors and authors about a new scam,” Jamie Trapp, of Queensland University of Technology, describes what happened when scammers tried to snare the journal he edits — Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine. We asked Trapp to answer a few questions about the scheme.
Retraction Watch (RW): You recently wrote about what you call “a new scam.” Tell us about this scam.
Continue reading ‘Disbelief’: Researchers, watch out for this new scam involving journal special issues
The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.
Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:
Continue reading How a plagiarized eye image in the NEJM was discovered
Journal stings come in various shapes and sizes. There are the hilarious ones in which authors manage to get papers based on Seinfeld or Star Wars published. There are those that play a role in the culture wars. And then there are some on a massive scale, with statistical analyses.
That’s how we’d describe the latest paper by Ottawa journalologists Kelly Cobey, David Moher and colleagues. We asked Cobey and Moher to answer some questions about the recently posted preprint, “Stress testing journals: a quasi-experimental study of rejection rates of a previously published paper.”
Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to do this study?
Continue reading A ‘stress test’ for journals: What happened when authors tried to republish a Nature paper more than 600 times?
A group of neuroscientists in Switzerland have retracted a 2019 paper in Science whose first author they say falsified data in the study.
The article, “Insular cortex processes aversive somatosensory information and is crucial for threat learning,” came from the lab of Ralf Schneggenburger, of the Ecole Polytechniqe Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). The first author was Emmanuelle Berret, then a post-doc in the lab.
EPFL issued a press release about the study when it appeared. According to the release, the research showed that the insular cortex — a region “deep within the lateral sulcus” — is in charge of processing how mice and humans (pace, James Heathers) apparently learn from painful stimuli:
Continue reading Neuroscience group retracts Science paper
Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has waged legal battles against those he feels have wronged him, has lost another of those fights.
A judge in Franklin County, Ohio, ruled against Croce in a case he brought against OSU to stop them from removing him as chair of his department. Croce had filed the suit late last year. Details are scant, but an order to terminate the case appeared in court records earlier this week.
An OSU spokesperson told Retraction Watch:
Continue reading Embattled cancer researcher loses legal bid to be reinstated as department chair at OSU
Researchers in Italy have retracted a 2019 paper on the genetics of a form of herpes virus after determining that the genomic sequences they thought they’d been analyzing proved to be something else.
The paper, “A complex evolutionary relationship between HHV-6A and HHV-6B,” appeared in July in Virus Evolution, an Oxford University Press title. The authors came from the Scientific Institute IRCCS in Lecco, and the University of Milan.
The article purported to find that:
Continue reading “Commendable”: Researchers retract a paper when they find gene sequence errors
A pair of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are suing the Journal of Biological Chemistry for defamation after the publication retracted one of their papers for problematic images.
Raju Reddy and Aravind Reddy Tarugu, who are not related, claim the JBC and its publisher, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, defamed them by retracting their 2014 paper on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Reddy is a visiting associate professor of medicine at Pitt and chief of pulmonology at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Aravind Targugu, also identified as Aravind T. Reddy, is employed by Pitt.
According to the suit, filed in August and first reported by the The Pennsylvania Record, the researchers say the retraction “severely” harmed their reputations and caused:
Continue reading Pitt researchers sue journal for defamation following retraction
A professor of political science at the University of Porto in Portugal has had at least five papers retracted for plagiarism.
Or, as one journal put it, Teresa Cierco “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources.”
Cierco’s areas of research include Kosovo, Macedonia, and Timor-Leste. The retractions, for papers published in 2013 and 2014, began in 2013, with three happening this year.
Cierco told Retraction Watch that she now realizes that she “did things wrong and tried to correct them.”
Continue reading Political science prof up to five retractions after she “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources”.jpg){kind=link}
