Category: history

“At a time when scientists and scientific research are already being criticised by persons who identify science with technology and who deplore some of the consequences of technology, dishonesty among scientists causes unease among scientists themselves and regretful or gleeful misgivings among publicists who are critical of science.“

Daryl Chubin wrote that in 1985 — a time when institutions we now take for granted, like the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, did not yet exist. We asked him to reflect on what has happened in the intervening four decades.

The phrase “misconduct in research” today is a quaint reminder of how much science has been captured by for-profit, politicized, international interests. As a four-decades-removed social researcher of misconduct, I marvel at how an investigation industry has emerged to monitor, analyze, report and decry the mischief around us. This “watcher community” represents an industry in an era of science most of us never envisioned.

In the days before the Office of Research Integrity, many accused researchers and their academic institutions were grasping for an accountability structure that was fair to all parties — adhering to due process – and swift in its resolutions. Good luck!  Today, the headlines in Retraction Watch reflect a publishing industry seemingly under siege—awash in retractions, plagiarism, AI mischief, undeclared conflicts of interest, whistleblowing, and a subset of ills that are dizzying and disconcerting to degrees never seen before. 

Retraction Watch monitors an industry ever more self-conscious about misdeeds in research, from analysis to interpretation to reporting. By setting the threshold low, it focuses on misdeeds that may be rare in a particular field, but substantial when aggregated across fields. Yes, there is a risk of overgeneralizing from statistical anomalies, but readers care about violations that sully “their” field.

Continue reading Reflecting on research misconduct: What’s next for the watcher community?

There once was a drug named Krebiozen;

It came from below the horizon.

It used to be said, by patients now dead,

Now what do we put our reliance on?

–Limerick attributed to University of Illinois president George Stoddard and University of Illinois provost Coleman Griffith, both of whom would lose their jobs over Krebiozen

It is a story that resonates with the present: A 1950s cancer treatment hoax that showed “charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery.” We’re pleased to share an adapted excerpt from Matthew Ehrlich’s The Krebiozen Hoax:  How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine, out today.

On March 26, 1951, one of America’s most respected scientists called a meeting at Chicago’s Drake Hotel to make a dramatic announcement: he and a Yugoslavian refugee doctor had found a drug that showed great promise in treating cancer. The scientist was Andrew Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois (U of I) and designated spokesperson for medical ethics at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. Time magazine had gone as far as to pronounce him “the conscience of U.S. science.” Ivy’s Yugoslavian collaborator was Stevan Durovic, said to have discovered the new drug in Argentina after the Nazis forced him to flee his homeland. The drug itself was called Krebiozen, a name that was supposed to connote “cancer suppressor” or “regulator of growth.”

Continue reading “Deceit, delusion, and a classic medical fraud”: An excerpt from a new book about a cancer treatment hoax

A journal has retracted, over the objections of the authors, a controversial 2023 paper claiming a dig site in Indonesia is home to the largest pyramid built by humans. 

The work was led by the Indonesian geologist-cum-archeologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, of the Research Center for Natural Disasters in Bandung.

Hilman has been working at the site in Java for many years in his quest to prove it contains the ruins of a massive pyramid built by an advanced culture between 9,000 and 27,000 years ago. Hilman has also tried to link the site to the lost city of Atlantis. 

But the notion that Gunung Padang is the mother of all pyramids – and, according to Hilman, the world’s oldest building – has been dismissed by some as “pseudoarchaeology,”

Continue reading Controversial pyramid paper retracted when authors turn out to have radiocarbon-dated nearby dirt

After bankrolling archeological work on a prehistoric site discovered during construction, a state department of transportation has successfully lobbied to retract an article about the researchers’ findings officials said were “published prematurely.”

The whole process was “a bit of a surprise” for the paper’s co-authors, said Logan Miller, one of the authors and an archeology professor at Illinois State University. He and lead author David Leslie both told Retraction Watch they stand by the article’s findings, but declined to comment further about the retraction.

Their research began in 2019, when the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) wanted to replace a bridge in the town of Avon. When construction workers started digging into the old bridge’s foundations, however, they discovered thousands of ancient objects from the Paleoindians, the earliest known people to live in New England. CTDOT temporarily halted the work and contracted an archaeology firm to excavate the site.

Continue reading ‘A bit of a surprise’: Transportation officials pushed to retract archaeology article on work they funded

The first book of a Yale professor of Chinese history contains a “multitude of problems,” according to a no-holds-barred review published last month.  

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State appeared last August from Harvard University Press. Its author, Maura Dykstra, is now an assistant professor of history at Yale.

In an extensive review that appeared in the Journal of Chinese History on August 31, George Qiao, an assistant professor of history and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College in Massachusetts, wrote that Dykstra’s book “fails to meet basic academic standards” and is “filled with misinformation.” 

The book’s problems, according to Qiao, include typos, as well as: 

Continue reading Yale professor’s book ‘systematically misrepresents’ sources, review claims

A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions. 

The article, “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” came from a group of scholars in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, and was led by Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist and the the director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford. 

The study prompted a significant amount of interest on social media and in the global press, according to Altmetric, with articles in Scientific American, Yahoo! News, PBS, El Pais and many other publications worldwide. As Scientific American put it, Whitehouse’s group found that the advent of moralizing gods did not lead to the formation of complex societies. Rather: 

Continue reading Critique topples Nature paper on belief in gods

More than a dozen book reviews by a history PhD student are under scrutiny for plagiarism concerns. 

The reviews are published in the Al-Masāq Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean, a Society for the Medieval Mediterranean journal published by Taylor & Francis. The majority of the papers appear to be stolen whole works from other authors published in different historical journals.

The society posted a retraction notice today saying that the reviews had been removed, but at the time of this writing, all 14 are still available on publisher Taylor & Francis’s site, without any editor’s notes or other flags.

The society’s notice says:

Continue reading Getting medieval: Society says it is retracting 14 book reviews for plagiarism

The journal that recently ran a controversial essay on poverty and race has flagged it with an editor’s note letting readers know about an investigation into the work. 

As we reported last week, Society, a Springer Nature title, published a paper by Lawrence Mead, of New York University, who argued that poor Blacks and Hispanics lack certain cultural traits that help European whites succeed in the face of economic adversity: 

Continue reading Paper called “unscholarly, overtly racist” earns an editor’s note

Hundreds of academics, anti-poverty advocates and others have signed petitions demanding the journal Society retract a new commentary which argues, in essence, that poor Black and Hispanic people in the United States are poor because they haven’t figured out how to be more white. 

One petition, to the editor of the journal, Jonathan Imber, had garnered more than 550 signatories by the time of this writing. Another, to the author of the paper, the editorial board of the journal, and the CEO of Springer Nature, which publishes the journal, was at 400 and counting.

The essay, by Lawrence Mead, a public policy researcher at New York University, argues that racism and a lack of good jobs do not explain why America, the world’s richest country, continues to have a problem with poverty. “More plausible,” Mead states, are differences in “culture”: 

Continue reading Hundreds petition to retract paper they call “unscholarly, overtly racist” and full of “racially violent narratives”