Nearly five months after a graduate student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine spontaneously confessed to cooking data, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said today that she has agreed to exclude herself from receiving government funding for three years.
According to the ORI, Meredyth Forbes: Continue reading Grad student who confessed to falsifying data barred from government funding
A leading medical journal is taking a second look at a recent high-profile paper about elephants’ lower risk of cancer, after receiving a call for retraction from a somewhat unusual corner: the animal rights group PETA.
This isn’t the first time the activist group has called for a retraction — last year, it nudged a journal to pull a paper that had been flagged for fraud by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. Their latest target: A 2015 paper in JAMA, which PETA claims contains inaccurate information.
What’s more, the organization argues, Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus — which partly funded the research — is using the findings as “justification for the continued use of abusive training techniques with elephants.” Yesterday, PETA sent a letter to the journal asking it to either retract the paper or issue an expression of concern, claiming: Continue reading JAMA takes all calls for retraction seriously — even from PETA
A week after announcing that a researcher formerly at the University of Chicago had faked the results of more than 70 experiments, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced yesterday that one of his colleagues also falsified data.
According to the ORI, Karen D’Souza Continue reading Fraudster’s colleague faked data, too
Epilepsy researcher Toni Schneider has received a retraction and a correction in quick succession, after a former colleague raised red flags about the work.
The retraction for Schneider, based at the University of Köln in Germany, is for “unintentional inclusion of erroneous data” due to limitations of the recording system used in the paper, according to the notice.
Marco Weiergräber, a former colleague of Schneider’s, has claimed that the authors of the paper did not use the test properly. The journal editor, however, told us he believes the original analysis is an “honest mistake,” and there is “no evidence” to suggest that the authors intentionally published incorrect analyses.
Here’s the retraction notice, issued by the journal in March 2016: Continue reading Epilepsy researcher gets retraction, correction after former colleague flags work
Neuroscientists have retracted a research letter less than two months after it appeared, admitting they appeared to pass off others’ data as their own.
Two of the researchers are listed as affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the incident has led to a misconduct investigation at the institution, a UCSF spokesperson told us.
The article, “DNAJC6 variants in Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” appeared in April. It was quickly followed by this notice, dated in May: Continue reading Neuro journal pulls article for data theft, prompts misconduct probe
A PLOS ONE paper about chronic pain plagiarized from multiple sources — 17, in fact.
According to the retraction notice released by the journal last week, the paper contains “extensive verbatim use of text from other sources.”
How did this make it past the editors? The journal published the paper in 2012 — before it began screening papers for plagiarism, according to a spokesperson.
Here’s the retraction notice for “The Effect of Social Stress on Chronic Pain Perception in Female and Male Mice:”
Continue reading PLOS ONE paper plagiarized from 17 articles — yes, 17
A paper at the center of a high-profile case of alleged misconduct in Hong Kong has earned a correction notice.
The correction replaces an expression of concern on the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) paper, which followed allegations of data manipulation. It provides some un-cropped images, and removes a co-author from the paper. However, it does not appear to address previous allegations of misconduct, nor a recent ruling from an investigation at Hong Kong University (HKU), which found that some of the data were “invalid.”
Here is the correction notice for “Molecular Imaging of Peroxynitrite with HKGreen-4 in Live Cells and Tissues:”
Continue reading JACS corrects, removes author from previously flagged paper
Authors have admitted to using material from another lab for their paper on neuroblastoma.
A spokesperson for Springer told us that the theft came to light when:
The scientists, from whom the data originated, contacted the journal.
The editor in chief of the journal investigated the case, the spokesperson told us, and then issued this retraction notice:
Continue reading Cancer researchers: We took data from another lab
The European Journal of Neuroscience has pulled a paper after learning that one author’s name had been included without his consent.
Co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Paul Bolam, told us that the Shandong University of Medicine in China (where the work was carried out) conducted an investigation and found “a serious case of academic misconduct” — one author had forged the signature of another researcher, in order to add him as a co-author on a project in which he had not participated.
Here’s the retraction notice, which tells us a bit more: Continue reading Neuroscientist forged co-author’s signature, submitted paper without consent
A former researcher at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago faked dozens of experiments and images over the course of six years, according to a new finding from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Ricky Malhotra, who studied heart cells, admitted to committing misconduct at both institutions, the ORI said in its report of the case. The fakery involved three National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications, one NIH progress report, one paper, seven presentations, and one image file. Despite an investigation at the University of Michigan, where Malhotra was from 2005-2006, he continued this falsification at [University of Chicago], after the [University of Michigan] research misconduct investigation was completed,” according to the ORI. The agency found that he Continue reading Heart researcher faked 70+ experiments, 100+ images