A month after a journalism investigation that led to resignations and turmoil at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, researchers including a Sloan Kettering scientist have quietly corrected at least two papers to add disclosures of financial conflicts of interest.
The two corrections, in Chemistry of Materials, are dated October 8, 2018 and read: Continue reading In wake of media scrutiny, Sloan Kettering author adds financial disclosures
A researcher at the University of Kentucky who studies the cancer risks of toxic chemicals has retracted three papers.
All of the retraction notices, which appear in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, refer to some kind of image duplication. The papers were originally published between 2014 and 2017, with the 2014 paper cited 39 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The address was supposed to be a triumphant inaugural speech.
On Friday, Leonid Eidelman, the incoming president of the World Medical Association (WMA), made up of representatives from national medical associations, stood up in front of the group’s members in Reykjavik, Iceland, and told them it was a great honor to become their leader.
The trouble was, his speech had lifted passages from various sources — including remarks one of his predecessors had given in 2014. The following morning, members of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) — including Chris Simpson, who had delivered the original 2014 speech — made a motion for Eidelman to resign. When that failed, the CMA said it was leaving the WMA.
CMA president Gigi Osler said in a statement: Continue reading Canadian Medical Association leaves international group after president plagiarizes past president’s speech
Kathy Partin, who served as director of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) for just under two years until being removed from the post late in 2017, has a new position at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Retraction Watch has learned.
As of yesterday (Sept. 30), Partin is intramural research integrity officer at the NIH. She replaces Melissa Colbert, who will be retiring. Continue reading Former director of U.S. research watchdog agency moves to NIH
A toxicology journal has issued an expression of concern for a group of papers about the controversial herbicide glyphosate after concluding that some of the authors didn’t adequately disclose their ties to the maker of the product.
At issue are five articles that appeared in a 2016 supplement to Critical Reviews in Toxicology, a Taylor & Francis title, about the chemical, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s blockbuster weed-killer Roundup. Although the authors of the articles don’t overlap perfectly, Keith Solomon, of the University of Guelph, in Canada, appears on three of the articles; Gary Williams, of New York Medical College, appears on three as well.
Williams was caught up in a ghost-writing scandal after court documents revealed that he had put his name on a published paper written by Monsanto employees. Solomon served on a panel funded by Monsanto that undercut the conclusions of a report from the World Health Organization that glyphosate is probably cancerous to people.
According to the expression of concern, which was first reported by Bloomberg today: Continue reading Journal flags papers, saying authors didn’t adequately disclose ties to Monsanto
A journal that retracted three papers earlier this year because of concerns that one of the authors had asked conference presenters to cite them has republished the articles, saying that it has “inconclusive evidence of improper behavior.”
In February, we reported that the Journal of Vibroengineering had retracted three papers by Magd Abdel Wahab, of Ghent University in Belgium. Wahab had chaired a recent conference, and as we reported then, almost three-quarters of papers that cited Wahab’s three papers originated from the conference. Journal editor Minvydas Ragulskis told us that was “large enough to assume a high probability for citation manipulation.”
At the time, Wahab told us the papers would be republished. And it turns that they were, not long after our original post. There is no explanation on the papers themselves, just a “Republished Paper” in front of the three titles, and an editorial note that is not linked, as best we can tell, from any of the papers.
Along with the citation data the investigation was based on, that note explains that: Continue reading Journal reverses retractions, says apparent citation manipulation was “an innocent and honest mistake”
A cancer researcher who went to court — unsuccessfully — claiming that commenters on PubPeer had cost him a new job has just lost another 12 papers.
The twelve now-retracted papers by Fazlul Sarkar and colleagues — as well as another by Sarkar that is now subject to an editor’s note — all appeared in Cancer Research, which made for a long table of contents in its September 15 issue. Continue reading Researcher who once tried to sue critics has another dozen papers retracted
H. Gilbert Welch, a leading researcher in the field of health policy, has resigned from his faculty post at Dartmouth College after the institution concluded that he had plagiarized from a colleague in a 2016 paper.
As we reported in STAT earlier this summer, a Dartmouth committee found that Welch had misused a figure from a colleague, Samir Soneji, who had provided him the data after a 2015 presentation. At the time, Soneji had requested that he be part of any paper that would include the data — but Welch said he had no intention of publishing it. However, the information appeared in a 2016 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, which has declined to retract or even correct the paper. Continue reading High-profile health policy researcher Gilbert Welch out at Dartmouth after plagiarism charge
Note: This post has been updated.
Here’s an object lesson for scientists who find out they’ve been ripped off by other researchers: Taking matters into your own hands can produce results.
An aggrieved author’s doggedness led to the retraction of a 2013 paper that plagiarized his work, along with the revocation of a doctoral degree by one of the scientists responsible for the theft and sanctions against another.
We don’t often get the blow-by-blow, but in this case we have the details to share. The story begins in early 2017, when Andrew Boyle, a professor of cardiac medicine at the University of Newcastle, in Australia, noticed something fishy in an article, “Cathepsin B inhibition attenuates cardiac dysfunction and remodeling following myocardial infarction by inhibiting the NLRP3 pathway.” The paper had appeared in a journal called Molecular Medicine Reports, from Spandidos.
The article, published by a group from Shandong Provincial Hospital, contained a pair of figures that Boyle recognized from his 2005 article in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. One of the images had been altered, but the other was a patent duplication.
Boyle explained that: Continue reading Persistence pays off for plagiarized author: emails spur retraction, sanctions against researcher
One of the suggestions we get regularly here at Retraction Watch is something along the lines of “This researcher publishes too much. You should look into that.” But how much is too much?
The phenomenon was the subject of a 2015 paper. It’s also the subject of a new article in Nature by John Ioannidis, of Stanford, and researchers at SciTech Strategies. The new article is unlikely to answer the question of how much is too much. But it provides some fascinating figures on just how often some authors publish, and even more so how they respond when asked just how they manage to publish so much, in the process raising questions about whether measuring productivity and quality in science should involve a ruler for stacked papers. Continue reading When it comes to authorship, how prolific is too prolific?