Category: by reason for retraction

How often do authors with retractions for misconduct continue to publish?

via Anna Creech/Flickr

How does retraction change publishing behavior? Mark Bolland and Andrew Grey, who were two members of a team whose work led to dozens of retractions for Yoshihiro Sato, now third on the Retraction Watch leaderboard, joined forces with Vyoma Mistry to find out. We asked Bolland to answer several questions about the new University of Auckland team’s paper, which appeared in Accountability in Research.

Retraction Watch (RW): You “undertook a survey of publication rates, for authors with multiple retractions in the biomedical literature, to determine whether they changed after authors’ first retractions.” What did you find?

Continue reading How often do authors with retractions for misconduct continue to publish?

Meet Elisabeth Bik, who finds problematic images in scientific papers for free

Courtesy Elisabeth Bik

Retraction Watch readers may know the name Elisabeth Bik, whose painstaking work inspecting tens of thousands of Western blot images has led to dozens of retractions in journals including PLOS ONE. Today in The Scientist, we profile Bik, a microbiologist who calls herself a “super-introvert.”

Bik tells us:

Continue reading Meet Elisabeth Bik, who finds problematic images in scientific papers for free

Compression plagiarism: An “under-recognized variety” that software will miss

Michael Dougherty

If you’re interested in plagiarism in the scholarly literature nowadays, you’ve probably come across the name Michael Dougherty. Dougherty’s efforts to root out plagiarism has led to dozens of retractions, including several by a prominent priest. In a new paper in Argumentation, Dougherty, author of the recent book Correcting the Scholarly Record for Research Integrity: In the Aftermath of Plagiarism, has coined a new term: “compression plagiarism.” We asked him more about the phenomenon, which Dougherty says “is invisible to unsuspecting readers and immune to anti-plagiarism software.”

Retraction Watch (RW): You define a term that is new to us: Compression plagiarism. What is compression plagiarism, and why is it particularly problematic? Continue reading Compression plagiarism: An “under-recognized variety” that software will miss

“A new form of plagiarism:” When researchers fake co-authors’ names

Mario Biagioli

There’s a new publishing trend in town, says Mario Biagioli: Faking co-authors’ names. Biagioli, distinguished professor of law and science and technology studies and director of the Center for Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis, writes in an article in Trends in Chemistry that it’s “the emergence of a new form of plagiarism that reflects the new metrics-based economy of scholarly publishing.” We asked him a few questions about what he’s found, and why authors might do this.

Retraction Watch (RW): You write that “A new trend in scientific misconduct involves listing fake coauthors on one’s publication.” Why would authors do that? Continue reading “A new form of plagiarism:” When researchers fake co-authors’ names

Too much skin in the game: Derm journal calls out author for duplication

We often praise authors for doing the right thing by retracting with transparency. Here’s a journal that deserves recognition for its handling of a case of duplicate publication.

Acta Dermatovenerologica Alpina, Pannonica et Adriatica (ADAPA), a European derm publication, has retracted a 2018 article in smack-down fashion, calling out a co-author for deceit. The paper was a case study titled “Inflamed bilateral linear atrophoderma of Moulin in an adult woman: a case report.” According to ADAPA, a reader noticed that a virtually identical article — with the same title — had appeared in a Turkish dermatology publication in late 2017.

In an lengthy editorial, Jovan Miljković, the editor-in-chief of the journal, explained what happened after a review of the two papers found them to be “virtually identical”: Continue reading Too much skin in the game: Derm journal calls out author for duplication

Former University of Washington researcher faked data, say Feds

Edward J. Fox, a former faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, faked data in a manuscript submitted to Nature and in an NIH grant application, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Fox, who initially confessed to some of the misconduct when confronted by the university, “neither admits nor denies ORI’s finding of research misconduct related to grant application R01 CA193649-01A1,” the ORI said in an announcement. However, he Continue reading Former University of Washington researcher faked data, say Feds

Time to say goodbye to “statistically significant” and embrace uncertainty, say statisticians

Nicole Lazar

Three years ago, the American Statistical Association (ASA) expressed hope that the world would move to a “post-p-value era.” The statement in which they made that recommendation has been cited more than 1,700 times, and apparently, the organization has decided that era’s time has come. (At least one journal had already banned p values by 2016.) In an editorial in a special issue of The American Statistician out today, “Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond P<0.05,” the executive director of the ASA, Ron Wasserstein, along with two co-authors, recommends that when it comes to the term “statistically significant,” “don’t say it and don’t use it.” (More than 800 researchers signed onto a piece published in Nature yesterday calling for the same thing.) We asked Wasserstein’s co-author, Nicole Lazar of the University of Georgia, to answer a few questions about the move. Here are her responses, prepared in collaboration with Wasserstein and the editorial’s third co-author, Allen Schirm.

So the ASA wants to say goodbye to “statistically significant.” Why, and why now? Continue reading Time to say goodbye to “statistically significant” and embrace uncertainty, say statisticians

Two papers yanked for lack of formal ethics approval

By Nick Youngson

Get it in writing. That’s the moral in a pair of retractions in different journals after authors claimed to have received oral — but not written — ethics approval for their research.

One paper, in the International Journal of Pediatrics, a Hindawi title, came from a group in Kuwait and Greece. Titled “Prevalence and associated factors of peer victimization (bullying) among grades 7 and 8 middle school students in Kuwait, the article appeared in February 2017.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Two papers yanked for lack of formal ethics approval

Semi-automated fact-checking for scientific papers? Here’s one method.

Jennifer Byrne

Wouldn’t it be terrific if manuscripts and published papers could be checked automatically for errors? That was the premise behind an algorithmic approach we wrote about last week, and today we bring you a Q&A with Jennifer Byrne, the last author of a new paper in PLOS ONE that describes another approach, this one designed to find incorrect nucleotide sequence reagents. Byrne, a scientist at the University of Sydney, has worked with the first author of the paper, Cyril Labbé, and has become a literature watchdog. Their efforts have already led to retractions. She answered several questions about the new paper.

Retraction Watch (RW): Seek & Blastn allows for “semi-automated fact-checking of nucleotide sequence reagents.” Can you explain what these reagents are used for, and what Seek & Blastn does? Continue reading Semi-automated fact-checking for scientific papers? Here’s one method.

A university thought its misconduct investigation was complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.

When Venkata Sudheer Kumar Ramadugu, then a postdoc at the University of Michigan, admitted to the university on June 28 of last year that he had committed research misconduct in a paper that appeared in Chemical Communications in 2017, he also “attested that he did not manipulate any data in his other four co-authored publications published while at the University of Michigan.”

And so, a few days later, Michael J. Imperiale, the university’s research integrity officer, wrote a letter to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) informing them of the findings. On August 2, Ramadagu was terminated from Michigan. And on August 3, Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, the head of the lab where Ramadagu had worked, wrote a letter to Chemical Communications requesting retraction of the paper.

While the retraction would not appear until the end of November, and ORI sanctions not announced until the end of December, Michigan’s responsibilities seemed to have been discharged as of early August. But documents obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request detail how that was not the end of the story. Continue reading A university thought its misconduct investigation was complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.