Melanie Pallansch-Cokonis, a former research technician at Southern Research Institute, faked data in work funded by NIH contracts and grants, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
According to the ORI’s case summary, available today in the Federal Register: Continue reading Research technician faked NIH-funded research: ORI
The journal Blood has retracted a 2010 paper over the objections of most of its authors, two of whom were found by their university to have used “fraudulent methods” to obtain the data.
We first reported on the case of Gerold Feuer last fall. The State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse fired Feuer in 2010 after determining that he had misused state funds to enrich a company he had founded, HuMurine. A court agreed with many of the university’s claims, but ordered his reinstatement in 2012.
Meanwhile, as we noted last fall: Continue reading Journal retracts stem cell study despite objections of most authors
The authors of a Current Biology paper published online in February of this year have retracted it after voluminous criticism on post-publication review site PubPeer and a university committee found evidence of figure manipulation.
The paper, “Agonist-Induced GPCR Shedding from the Ciliary Surface Is Dependent on ESCRT-III and VPS4,” was co-authored by Hua Jin and Livana Soetedjo, a graduate student in Jin’s lab. Soetedjo was first author, and Jin was corresponding author.
The comments at PubPeer began on March 24: Continue reading Authors retract Current Biology study following criticism on PubPeer and university investigation
We recently came across a paper in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, an Elsevier title, that had been temporarily removed without explanation. While we see a fair number of such opaque notices from Elsevier — and have written about why we think they’re a bad idea — we took interest in this one because the last author, Toren Finkel of the NIH, was the corresponding author of a Nature paper retracted earlier this year. (He also had two corrections on one Science paper, both of which are paywalled.)
What we learned suggests the withdrawal was completely unrelated to the Nature retraction, but also reveals a journal editor’s exasperation.
Last month, we published a guest post by Jean Hazel Mendoza about the retraction of a Molecular Cell paper for sampling errors, flawed analysis, and and miscalculation.
Mendoza heard back from Jean-François Allemand, the head of one of the labs involved. Allemand tells Retraction Watch by email that when his group tried to repeat the experiment, they suspected of “missing” or “averaging” of data points in the retracted paper: Continue reading Update: Lab head shares “painful” process that led to Molecular Cell retraction
A group at the University of Texas Southwestern led by Adi F. Gazdar that found evidence of inappropriate image manipulation in a number of their papers has retracted its seventh and eighth studies.
Here’s the notice for 2005’s “Aberrant methylation profile of human malignant mesotheliomas and its relationship to SV40 infection,” in Oncogene: Continue reading UT-Southwestern cancer researchers up to 8 retractions
A pair of University of Utah researchers who both left their posts last year following an investigation into problems with their work have had another paper retracted from Cell Metabolism.
The investigation found “reckless disregard” in papers in which Ivana De Domenico was first author. She left the university at the end of June 2013, and and her lab head, Jerry Kaplan, retired at the same time.
Here’s the notice for 2008’s “The Hepcidin-Binding Site on Ferroportin Is Evolutionarily Conserved:” Continue reading Former University of Utah researchers, one guilty of “reckless disregard,” have another paper retracted
Bharat Aggarwal, the MD Anderson researcher who has threatened to sue Retraction Watch for writing about issues in his papers, has corrected another study.
Here’s the notice for “Induction of Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis by the Proteasome Inhibitor PS-341 in Hodgkin Disease Cell Lines Is Independent of Inhibitor of Nuclear Factor-κB Mutations or Activation of the CD30, CD40, and RANK Receptors:” Continue reading Cancer researcher who threatened to sue Retraction Watch corrects another paper
The authors of a 2005 article on E. coli in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology have lost the paper because they recombined it from previous work.
The article, titled “Strategies for efficient production of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli,” came from a pair of biochemical engineers from the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, in New Delhi, India.
According to the abstract: Continue reading De-coli: Plagiarism leads to retraction of highly cited recombinant protein paper
Science has retracted two papers by Frank Sauer, of the University of California, Riverside, after the university found evidence of serious image manipulation.
Here’s the notice, signed by Science editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt: Continue reading Science retracts two papers for image manipulation