The BMJ is well-known for its annual Christmas issue, which New York Times medical correspondent Lawrence Altman calls
a lighter and sometimes brighter side of medicine, publishing unusual articles that vary from simply amusing to bizarre to creative or potentially important.
A group of researchers in South Africa has lost their 2012 article in BMC Research Notes after one of the author’s institutions evidently pulled rank and sought to claim the data as its own.
The article, “Association of body weight and physical activity with blood pressure in a rural population in the Dikgale village of Limpopo Province in South Africa,” appeared last February. Its first author was Seth Mkhonto, who listed two affiliations, the Human Sciences Research Council, in Pretoria, and the University of the Limpopo.
But the latter institution seems not to have given Mkhonto approval to publish the data — a rather strange state of affairs given the whole “publish or perish” ethos of academia.
The Journal of Pediatric Nursing has retracted a 2013 article (meeting abstract, really) on growth hormone after the drug company that employed the authors cried “take it back.”
The research appears to have been presented at a meeting of the Pediatric Endocrinology Nursing Society, and looked at inefficiency in the use of devices for administering growth hormone. All but one of the authors is listed as working for Novo Nordisk, an international pharmaceutical firm.
Institute of Endocrinology and Experimental Oncology
A leading Neapolitan cancer researcher is under criminal investigation for fraud, the Italian press is reporting.
Although we have only rough translations of the story, it seems the researcher, Alfredo Fusco, of the National Council of Research’s Institute of Experimental Endocrinology and Oncology, has been accused of manipulating images in published studies and to strengthen the case for grants from the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC).
The case covers eight papers published between 2001 and 2012, according to the media reports. We don’t know the specifics of the eight articles, nor why none appears yet to have been retracted. In our experience, the criminal inquiries usually follow the expose of scientific misconduct, not the other way around.
Fusco’s work is highly cited, with some 50 papers cited at least 100 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Nitin Aggarwal, formerly of the Medical College of Wisconsin, faked data in his PhD thesis, grant applications to the NIH and American Heart Association, and in two papers, according to new findings by the Office of Research Integrity.
(The case would have apparently first been published in the Federal Register on October 2, except for the government shutdown.)
A group of authors from Saudi Arabia and Egypt has lost their 2012 paper in the International Journal of Dentistry for what appears to be a case of large-scale lifting of text from a previously published paper.
We don’t usually cover “pretractions” (see #5 for why), but our friend Larry Husten over at Forbes has a story today about what appears to be a dead paper walking.
The article, in Heart, comes from a group of prominent researchers in Italy who have been arrested for possibly failing to adequately consent their patients, among other potential misdeeds.
Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications has withdrawn a paper it published earlier this year on metabolic proteins linked to diabetes, not because the article was bogus but because the authors appear to have been. The work itself is accurate — indeed, it likely belongs to a Harvard scientist, Bruce Spiegelman, who’d presented his data on the subject several times recently and was in the process of preparing his results for publication. We’ve written about researchers trying to punk journals with faked articles, and about a researcher who apparently made up a co-author, but here’s something new!
Second Life is a virtual reality site in which you can “Experience endless surprises and unexpected delights in a world imagined and created by people like you.” Only Nikolaos Pellas, of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, is now having two papers on virtual reality retracted because he apparently experienced endless surprises and unexpected delights in a world imagined and created by other people.
