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Disgraced Korea scholar, formerly of Columbia, loses paper for plagiarism

A former historian at Columbia University who resigned last year in the wake of a plagiarism scandal involving his award-winning book on North Korea has lost a 2005 paper for misusing his sources.

In 2017, Charles Armstrong, once a leading figure in Korean scholarship, returned the 2014 John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Society after allegations emerged that he had plagiziared widely in his book, “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”

At the time, Armstrong admitted to having made “citation errors” in the work. However, Balazs Szalontai, an academic in Korea, insisted that the the errors were in fact plagiarism and that they were sweeping.

Now, in what Szalotai told us was the earliest instance of Armstrong’s plagiarism that he has found, the journal Cold War History is retracting an article by Armstrong. According to the notice:

Journal retracts hotly contested paper on vaping and heart attacks

The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks.

The paper, by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, has faced a barrage of criticism since its publication last June — and Glantz’s claims, in a blog post, that the study was “More evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.”

Brad Rodu, a professor at the University of Louisville who comments frequently on vaping, asked the journal to retract the study shortly after it was published. The study, he said, had failed to account for which happened first — heart attacks or vaping. The contretemps was the subject of a July 2019 story by USA Today:

Journals retract 13 papers by Hans Eysenck, flag 61, some 60 years old

Two journals have retracted 13 papers co-authored by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, following a university investigation that found dozens of his papers to be “unsafe.”

One of the journals, Perceptual and Motor Skills, subjected 36 of Eysenck’s papers to expressions of concern, while another — Psychological Reports — subjected 25 of them to the same flag. Both journals are published by SAGE.

A May 2019 report by King’s College London into the work of Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, apparently of the University Heidelberg, that more than two dozen papers be retracted. Among other issues, the report cited

If articles about a Schrödinger equation are retracted, do they still exist?

Can two articles about aspects of Schrödinger’s work exist in the literature at the same time if they have plagiarized from other papers about the same subjects?

The first paper, “Fixed point theorems for solutions of the stationary Schrödinger equation on cones,” appeared in 2015 and was written by Gaixian Xue, of Henan University of Economics and Law in China, and Eve Yuzbasi, of Istanbul University. According to the retraction notice, from Fixed Point Theory and Applications:

Duplicated study of apologizers leads to a retraction — and an apology

The Journal of Consumer Research has retracted a 2019 paper because it overlapped significantly with a study previously published in Chinese by the same authors.

But whether both authors agreed to the previous submission is a subject of some confusion on the part of one of them.

The journal, published by Oxford Academic, added “RETRACTED” to the beginning of the paper’s title, “Sorry by Size: How the Number of Apologizers Affects Apology Effectiveness,” but did not include a retraction notice, nor any other explanation. The notice, second author Sam Maglio, of the University of Toronto, told Retraction Watch, will read:

Journal retracts 30-year-old paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck

The International Journal of Sport Psychology has retracted a paper by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, whose work has faced doubts since the early 1990s.

The paper, published in 1990, was one of dozens by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek found to be “unsafe” by King’s College London, but appears to be the first to be retracted.

Here’s the abstract of “Psychological factors as determinants of success in football and boxing: The effects of behaviour therapy”:

WHO formally retracts opioid guidelines that came under fire

The World Health Organization has officially retracted its controversial guidelines on the use of opioid analgesics.

The agency’s move applies to two statements, issued in 2011 and 2012. Last June, WHO announced that it was “discontinuing” the guidelines in the wake of a critical report which said the documents were heavily tainted by commercial bias. According to a BMJ story published at the time:

Prominent cancer researcher loses nine papers, making 10

Andrew Dannenberg (credit Patricia Kuharic)

The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) has retracted nine papers in bulk by a group of cancer researchers in New York led by the prominent scientist Andrew Dannenberg.

The work of Dannenberg’s group at Weill Cornell — and the figures in particular — has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for more than two years.

The group also lost an article more than a decade ago in The Lancet, bringing their total so far to 10. Cancer Discovery subjected a paper to an expression of concern in August. Much of the tainted work was funded by grants from the U.S. government, as well as from funding authorities in other countries.

According to the notice for 2014’s “p53 protein regulates Hsp90 ATPase activity and thereby Wnt signaling by modulating Aha1 expression“:

Nobel winner retracts paper from Science

A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.

Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:

How a plagiarized eye image in the NEJM was discovered

The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.

Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:

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