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:
Continue reading Digging deeper: Authors retract soil paper so “the error we made does not propagate”
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.
Continue reading Has reproducibility improved? Introducing the Transparency and Rigor Index
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.
Continue reading ‘I’m starting the year off with something I didn’t expect to ever do: I’m retracting a paper.’
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:
Continue reading Author ‘still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity’ after a reviewer steals his work
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:
Continue reading Former UMass post-doc faked data, says federal watchdog
A Federal court in California has ruled in favor of the popular training program CrossFit in its lawsuit against a nonprofit group — a competitor in fitness training — awarding the workout company nearly $4 million in sanctions.
Why are you reading about this case on Retraction Watch, you might ask? Well, at the heart of the suit, first filed in 2014, was a now-retracted 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research — published by the NSCA — showing, erroneously, that CrossFit was linked to an increased risk for injuries. The journal initially corrected the article, but as CrossFit noted, the publication never acknowledged fabrication of data.
The senior author of that paper, Steven Devor, resigned his position at The Ohio State University after the retraction in mid-2017. As we reported at the time, the institution had demanded:
Continue reading Crossfit wins $4 million sanction in lawsuit stemming from now-retracted paper
A medical journal in Italy has retracted at least 17 papers by researchers in that country who appear to have been caught in a citation scam. The journal says it also fired three editorial board members for “misconduct” in the matter.
The retractions, from Acta Medica Mediterranea, occurred in 2017 and 2018, but we’re just finding out about them now; 14 involve roughly the same group of neuroscientists, while three are by different authors from some of the same institutions as the first team.
The journal last year issued two statements on its website about the cases, which it began investigating in 2018. The first, on Feb. 1, 2019 (we think), declared:
Continue reading Journal retracted at least 17 papers for self-citation, 14 with same first author
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