The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has sanctioned an assistant professor of dermatology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland for plagiarizing from a grant application she was reviewing — which feels like a scientific version of insider trading — and a number of published papers.
According to the ORI’s findings, Pratima Karnik Continue reading Case Western dermatology department hit with second ORI sanction within 6 months
It was the last study ever published from prominent scientist Gerd Maul’s lab. And now it’s been retracted.
Maul was a highly cited cell biologist, with 30 papers cited at least 100 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. He was also a well-known sculptor. When he died in 2010, he had a paper under submission at Cancer Research, which was published late that year.
This year, however, his co-authors found problems with the study. And as the notice — one of the most detailed we’ve ever seen — explains: Continue reading A sad postscript: Paper by deceased researcher retracted
Okay, so it’s not quite Kafka, but a group of forensic geneticists from Prague’s Charles University has lost a paper in Folia Biologica (a journal from that famed institution where Kafka studied) over what appears to be a rather Byzantine dispute about authorship and the quality of the data.
The 2010 article, “DNA analysis of ancient skeletal remains” was written by a trio of authors from Charles University’s Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics. According to its abstract: Continue reading Author stalemate in Czech DNA paper leads to retraction
Irony alert: If you’re going to write articles about recurrent neural networks, make sure they don’t, well, recur.
The journal Neural Networks has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of researchers from Spain for publishing what amounted to a repeat of a 2011 article in a different but closely related journal. Scientific publishing, alas, is not like Hollywood, where remakes of movies and TV shows is not only acceptable, it seems to be the only flavor producers are willing to taste.
The article was titled “Hopf Bifurcation Stability in Hopfield Neural Networks” — Hopf, for those keeping score at home, is Eberhard Hopf, a famous (and politically controversial) mathematician and founder of something called ergodic theory — and it came from scientists at the University of La Laguna, in the Canary Islands.
According to the notice: Continue reading Neural Networks retracts rerun
The University of Tokyo panel investigating the work of a former professor there, Shigeaki Kato, has recommended the retraction of 43 of his group’s articles, according to a report in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
If the papers are indeed retracted, Kato, who already has at least five articles subject to an expression of concern and five retractions, would be fifth on the list of most retractions for a single author, by our unofficial tally. His fellow countryman, Yoshitaka Fujii, continues to hold the lead at what appears to be 183, followed by Joachim Boldt (~89), John Darsee (~83), and Diederik Stapel, at 53. [See note at end.]
The Asahi report quotes Kato — who has received some $20 million in government funding for his work — as acknowledging problems with the data in his studies: Continue reading Tokyo panel calls for retraction of 43 Kato papers
A lab run by a Canada Research Chair at the Ottawa Research Institute has retracted a paper — in a journal the chair edits — for what sounds a lot like inappropriate image manipulation.
Here’s the notice from Skeletal Muscle: Continue reading Paper by Canada Research Chair retracted from journal he edits for blots “from unrelated samples”
Earlier this month we wrote about the retraction by Nature of a 19-year-old paper by Karel Bezouska, a former star researcher at Prague’s Charles University whose “dangerous and irresponsible deviations” from acceptable practice went as far as tampering with refrigerated samples to cover his tracks.
BMC Biotechnology has retracted another Bezouska paper, this one from 2011. He’s the second author on the article, titled “Heterologous expression, purification and characterization of nitrilase from Aspergillus niger K10.”
Continue reading Second retraction for Czech fraudster Bezouska, who broke into lab
So how long do researchers have to keep records of experiments?
We had that question while reading the retraction notice for a 2007 paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation: Continue reading JCI paper retracted for duplicated panels after authors can’t provide original data
Try as we may, we can’t cover every retraction in real time. But on the principle that late is better than later, here’s one from 2012 that we’ve been meaning to get to.
The journal NeuroReport has retracted a 2011 article by a group of researchers who evidently discovered a fatal flaw in one of their figures.
The article, “Ghrelin prevents neuronal apoptosis and cognitive impairments in sepsis-associated encephalopathy,” by a team of intensivists from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, purported to find that ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, appeared to have something of a protective effect against the ravages of sepsis in rat brains. It has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including once by the retraction.
As the abstract stated: Continue reading “Major error” forces retraction of ghrelin study
The Journal of Neuroscience has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet for what appears to be research misconduct. But more on that in a moment.
The article, “The Existence of FGFR1-5-HT1A Receptor Heterocomplexes in Midbrain 5-HT Neurons of the Rat: Relevance for Neuroplasticity,” came from the lab of Kjell Fuxe, whose interests include Parkinson’s disease, addiction and depression. The first and second authors, Dasiel Oscar Borroto-Escuela and Wilber Romero-Fernandez, are listed as being post-docs in the lab.
According to the notice: Continue reading Journal of Neuroscience retracts plasticity paper for “substantial data misrepresentation”