An honest error has prompted the first retraction of a paper published in F1000Research, a relatively new open science journal that publishes all articles before peer review and then solicits such review.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Open science journal F1000Research posts its first retraction
The editor of a psychology journal has had seven papers in a different psychology journal retracted, for either plagiarism or duplication, although the notices are vague.
Here are the seven articles by Paraskevi Theofilou, editor of Health Psychology Research, in Europe’s Journal of Psychology: Continue reading Psychology journal editor has seven articles retracted for duplication or plagiarism
The first retraction has appeared for Alfred Fusco, a leading cancer researcher in Italy under criminal investigation for fraud.
Here’s the notice from the Journal of Clinical Investigation: Continue reading Retraction appears for Italian cancer specialist facing criminal investigation
Has anyone seen our irony meter?
The author of a 2003 study on “the ethics of being first” is retracting it because it turns out he had already published it elsewhere — making it, well, not first.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Surgical Research and the Ethics of Being First,” the Journal of Value Inquiry paper: Continue reading Who’s on first? Paper on “the ethics of being first” retracted because it was…second
The Retraction Watch archives are full of dubious distinctions — most retractions by a single researcher, longest time between publication and retraction, etc. — but now we have a competition for another: “The three most plagiarized papers.”
That new category comes to us courtesy of a retraction notice in The Scientific World Journal, “Recent Advances in DENV Receptors,” by a group of researchers in China. Here’s the new notice: Continue reading And the award for the “three most plagiarized papers” goes to…
The Brazilian medical journal Clinics — edited by the Faculdade de Medicina of the University of São Paulo — has lost two more papers in a citation stacking scheme that cost one of the authors his job as editor of the publication.
The first paper, by former editor Mauricio Rocha-e-Silva and Ariane Gomes, was titled “An overview of recently published medical papers in Brazilian scientific journals,” and was published in 2011. As the retraction notice states: Continue reading Medical journal guilty of citation manipulation retracts two “inadequate” review articles
Last month, we reported on the case of Nitin Aggarwal, who earned his PhD at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and who, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), faked data in his graduate thesis, in applications for National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association grant, and in two published papers.
Given the findings about his PhD thesis — and the fact that he had won a $1,000 award for his dissertation — we were curious whether he would lose his degree. Ravi Misra, dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Graduate School of Biomedical Science, tells Retraction Watch he won’t: Continue reading Scientist who faked data in his thesis will keep his PhD
We’ve been reporting on retractions of research published by Cardiff University scientists following an investigation into their work. On Monday, we noted a new retraction of work by the group in Cancer Research, which we thought was the second retraction following one in the Journal of Immunology in 2011. But it turns out there was another retraction published at the same time in the same journal, which we now know about thanks to commenter David Hardman and PubPeer.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading A third retraction stemming from Cardiff investigations
A group of authors from Emory University, has lost another paper for image manipulation, bringing their total to at least four. What makes this particularly interesting is that the main actor in the figure fakery, Lian Zuo, does not appear to have been involved this time.
Zuo, you may recall, was cited in multiple retraction notices back in 2011 after Emory investigators concluded that he appeared to have been fabricating figures. But, one of the notices, from Circulation Research, raised the possibility that someone else was implicated, too: Continue reading Another image falsification retraction for Emory heart researchers
Last year, two psychology researchers set out to figure out whether the statistical results psychologists were reporting in the literature were distributed the way you’d expect. We’ll let the authors, E.J. Masicampo, of Wake Forest, and Daniel Lalande, of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, explain why they did that:
The psychology literature is meant to comprise scientific observations that further people’s understanding of the human mind and human behaviour. However, due to strong incentives to publish, the main focus of psychological scientists may often shift from practising rigorous and informative science to meeting standards for publication. One such standard is obtaining statistically significant results. In line with null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), for an effect to be considered statistically significant, its corresponding p value must be less than .05.
When Masicampo and Lalande looked at a year’s worth of three highly cited psychology journals — the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Psychological Science — from 2007 to 2008, they found: Continue reading “Just significant” results have been around for decades in psychology — but have gotten worse: study