Analytical Letters has retracted a 2011 article by a chemistry researcher at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, who seems to have avoided giving credit where credit was due.
The article, “Conducting Polymer Matrix Poly(2,2′-bithiophene) Mercury Metal Incorporation,” was written (so readers were told) by Suzanne Lunsford.
Here’s how the retraction notice explains it: Continue reading Analyze this! Analytical Letters retracts chemistry paper for authorship misdirection
PubMed today launches a pilot version of PubMed Commons,
a system that enables researchers to share their opinions about scientific publications. Researchers can comment on any publication indexed by PubMed, and read the comments of others.
In general, we’re big fans of post-publication peer review, as Retraction Watch readers know. Once it’s out of its pilot phase — and we hope that’s quite soon — PubMed Commons comments will be publicly available. So this is a step forward — but only a tentative one. That’s because of the first bullet point in the terms of service commenters agree to: Continue reading PubMed now allows comments on abstracts — but only by a select few
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.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Nursing journal pulls Novo Nordisk growth hormone paper over data provenance
Sometimes, authors and journals editors seem to think a bit of mystery is a good thing. Take a recent retraction in Brain.
Here’s the notice for “Selective impairment of hand mental rotation in patients with focal hand dystonia:” Continue reading “Ambiguities in the presentation of some of the data” lead to an ambiguous retraction notice
Physica B: Condensed Matter has retracted a 2013 paper by a group from Morocco and France for, well, inappropriate condensation of printed matter.
The article, “Granular and intergranular conduction in La1.32Sr1.68Mn2O7 layered manganite system,” came mostly from a team of physicists at University Ibn Zohr, and appeared in June.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Plagiarism leads to retraction of conduction paper
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.
According to the institute’s website: Continue reading Italian cancer specialist facing criminal investigation for misconduct
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.)
Here were their findings: Continue reading Cardiology researcher faked data in his prizewinning PhD thesis — and NIH, AHA grants: ORI
We’ve sometimes said, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, that pre-publication peer review is the worst way to vet science, except for all the other ways that have been tried from time to time.
The authors of a new paper in PLOS Biology, Adam Eyre-Walker and Nina Stoletzki, compared three of those other ways to judge more than 6,500 papers published in 2005:
subjective post-publication peer review, the number of citations gained by a paper, and the impact factor of the journal in which the article was published
Their findings? Continue reading Is impact factor the “least-bad” way to judge the quality of a scientific paper?
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.
The now-retracted article was titled “A Prospective Study of Early Loaded Single Implant-Retained Mandibular Overdentures: Preliminary One-Year Results,” and has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
From the abstract: Continue reading Say “Argh!” Dental journal extracts paper for plagiarism
About a month ago, we reported on a retraction by Pamela Ronald, of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues. We noted then that this was a case of scientists doing the right thing. Ronald contacted us after that post ran, and let us know that there would be another retraction shortly. That retraction notice has now appeared, in Science: Continue reading Pamela Ronald does the right thing again, retracting a Science paper