Title: Bioethics and Medical Education
What Caught Our Attention: As we’ve said before, you can’t make this stuff up: An article on bioethics had its own ethical issues to deal with. It turns out, the authors had “substantial unreferenced overlap” with another article, that “overlap” including the article’s title. Here’s a side by side comparison of the first page, highlighting the matching text: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Bioethics article retracted for…ethics violation
In 2004, a survey of editors of economic journals found 3 out of 10 had seen at least one case of plagiarism within the past year. More than a decade later, has the problem gotten better? Or worse? Gary Hoover at the University of Oklahoma, who co-authored the 2004 paper, decided to revisit the issue by resurveying editors in economics, along with others working in different fields. What he found — and reported in Social Science Quarterly — was plagiarism is still a problem, which economists want to address.
Retraction Watch: Why did you want to revisit the findings from the 2004 survey of editors in economics 10 years later?
Continue reading Is plagiarism a problem in economics? Survey of editors says … yes
A biology journal has retracted a 2011 paper after the University of California, Los Angeles determined that the data in three figures “cannot be supported.”
In February, the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology retracted the paper, which explores efforts to engineer bacteria to convert plant biomass into biofuel.
Claudia Modlin, assistant director of UCLA’s Office of Research Policy and Compliance, told Retraction Watch that the university informed the journal about the issues last October, after reviewing the work. Continue reading Data in biofuel paper “had either been grossly misinterpreted or fabricated”
Nowadays, there are many ways to access a paper — on the publisher’s website, on MEDLINE, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and other outlets. So when the publisher retracts a paper, do these outlets consistently mark it as such? And if they don’t, what’s the impact? Researchers Caitlin Bakker and Amy Riegelman at the University of Minnesota surveyed more than one hundred retractions in mental health research to try to get at some answers, and published their findings in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. We spoke to Bakker about the potential harm to patients when clinicians don’t receive consistent notifications about retracted data.
Retraction Watch: You note: “Of the 144 articles studied, only 10 were represented as being retracted across all resources through which they were available. There was no platform that consistently met or failed to meet all of [the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)’s] guidelines.” Can you say more about these findings, and the challenges they may pose?
Continue reading Want to tell if a paper has been retracted? Good luck
A researcher who is facing a criminal investigation in Italy for research misconduct has seen five more papers retracted, for a total of 16 15.
Molecular and Cellular Biology has retracted four papers published between 1987 to 2001 by Alfredo Fusco, a cancer researcher in Italy; the Journal of Virology retracted one 1985 paper. Fusco was first author on two papers and last author on three. Both journals are published by The American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which issued identical retraction notices for all five papers, mentioning “evidence of apparent manipulation and duplication.”
Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher now at the Ohio State University, who has been dogged by misconduct allegations, co-authored one of the papers. Croce now has eight retractions.
Here’s the notice presented for all five retractions: Continue reading Retraction count for Italian researcher swells to 15 as five papers fall
When Nicholas Peppas, chair of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered one of his papers had been plagiarized, he decided to “go public!”
On February 27, Peppas tweeted about a “gross case of plagiarism:” He alleged a 2013 review published in Saudi Pharmaceutical Journal had directly copied sections of his 2011 review in Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews—both published by Elsevier. (The tweet includes a side-by-side image of a section of the two texts.) Continue reading A “GROSS CASE OF PLAGIARISM:” How did one Elsevier journal plagiarize another?
When Alexander Harms arrived at the University of Copenhagen in August 2016, as a postdoc planning to study a type of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, he carried with him a warning from another lab who had recruited him:
People said, “If you go there, you have to deal with these weird articles that nobody believes.”
The papers in question had been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and Cell in 2013. Led by Kenn Gerdes, Harms’s new lab director, the work laid out a complex chain of events that mapped out how an E. coli bacterium can go into a dormant state, called persistence, that allows it to survive while the rest of its colony is wiped out.
Despite some experts’ skepticism, each paper had been cited hundreds of times. And Harms told us:
I personally did believe in the published work. There had been papers from others that kind of attacked [the Gerdes lab’s theory], but that was not high-quality work.
But by November 2016, Harms figured out that the skeptics had been right. Continue reading Overlooked virus “generated a mess,” infected highly cited Cell, PNAS papers
The editorial board of an architecture journal has resigned en masse after the publisher announced it plans to terminate the editor’s contract at the end of this year.
In an open letter to publisher Taylor and Francis, the editorial board of Building Research and Information says the publisher’s decision is:
deeply shocking and we strenuously disagree with this decision. It is not in the best interests of the journal or the community served by the journal.
Taylor & Francis have argued that an editor’s term should be limited. But many academics disagree — an online petition to save outgoing editor Richard Lorch (started by Lorch himself) has collected hundreds of signatures; many people on Twitter have posted comments using the hashtag “#saveBRIeditor.”
At the end of the open letter, three associate editors and dozens of board members write:
Continue reading Associate editors, editorial board resign from architecture journal in protest
A biology journal is investigating concerns about a 2014 paper by a marine biologist who was found guilty of misconduct last year.
In December, Uppsala University concluded that Oona Lönnstedt had “fabricated the results” of a controversial 2016 Science paper (now retracted), which examined the harms of human pollution on fish. (Lönnstedt’s supervisor Peter Eklöv was also found guilty of misconduct and had a four-year government grant terminated.) Continue reading Journal investigating earlier work by author of discredited fish-microplastics paper
Carlo Croce, who has had numerous papers retracted and corrected for issues including image manipulation, has received an award for more than $300,000 for his achievements in personalized medicine.
The Dan David Prize, awarded earlier this month by a charitable organization based at Tel Aviv University, bestowed $1 million to three researchers who have “made pioneering and ground-breaking discoveries in the field of personalized medicine.”
Croce, chair of the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics at The Ohio State University, shares this year’s award with two prominent researchers—Mary-Claire King, a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Bert Vogelstein, a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Continue reading Cancer researcher under cloud of suspicion wins $300,000 science prize