Category: caught our notice

Caught Our Notice: Wait…we wrote WHAT paper?

Via Wikimedia

Title: Assessment of coronary heart diseases in diabetics in al-Madinah al-Munawarah

What Caught Our Notice: We’ve seen researchers dinged for adding authors to papers who didn’t participate in the research, but it’s rare to have a notice say co-author signatures were forged. In a recent retraction, the first two authors said the signatures on the the approval document received by the journal do not belong to them. The notice does not indicate which of the remaining two co-authors might be responsible for the forgery. Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Wait…we wrote WHAT paper?

Caught Our Notice: “Profoundly sorry” researcher retracts Alzheimer’s-DDT paper

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Title: Immune response cytokines as potential biomarkers for DDT induced neurodegeneration

What Caught Our Attention:  Does exposure to pesticides such as DDT influence the onset of Alzheimer’s? Hard to say, especially after a researcher retracted a recent paper purporting to find a link in mice, a few months after a press release was issued about the work. The notice took on an unusual format — Continue reading Caught Our Notice: “Profoundly sorry” researcher retracts Alzheimer’s-DDT paper

Caught Our Notice: Oops — paper included proofreader’s query

Via Wikimedia

Title: Concise Review: Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Neurodegenerative Diseases

What Caught Our Attention: Everyone makes mistakes — but some are more amusing than others. In one recent correction, the publisher (Wiley) admitted to including a proofreader’s query in the published manuscript. But didn’t say what the query was.

We looked around, and think we found the added notes in the abstract on the PubMed entry (emphasis ours):  Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Oops — paper included proofreader’s query

Caught Our Notice: Dear peer reviewer, please read the methods section. Sincerely, everyone

Via Wikimedia

Title: Plasma contributes to the antimicrobial activity of whole blood against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

What Caught Our Attention: A big peer review (and perhaps academic mentorship) fail.  These researchers used the wrong anticoagulant for their blood samples, leading them to believe that certain blood components were fighting microbes. The authors counted the number of colonies to show how well or poorly Tuberculin mycobacteria were growing in cultures — but blood samples need anticoagulants to prevent clots before analysis, and they used an anticoagulant that actually prevented the microbes from colonizing. The authors (and reviewers) should have known this from  Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Dear peer reviewer, please read the methods section. Sincerely, everyone

Caught Our Notice: A nearly unreadable paper criticizing 2017 Nobel pick

Via Wikimedia

Title: Nobel Prize Physiology 2017 (for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm) is On Fiction as There Is No Molecular Mechanisms of Biological Clock Controlling the Circadian Rhythm. Circadian Rhythm Is Triggered and Controlled By Divine Mechanism (CCP – Time Mindness (TM) Real Biological Clock) in Life Sciences 

What Caught Our Attention: This isn’t a retraction — rather, it’s a puzzling paper that we couldn’t help flagging for readers. From the title, to the affiliation (Das Nursing Home, India University Of God), to the reference list with only 11 entries — eight of which are written by the author himself — this is a paper that got our notice.

Continue reading Caught Our Notice: A nearly unreadable paper criticizing 2017 Nobel pick

Caught Our Notice: Author of controversial retracted paper earns Swedish gov’t grant

Last week, a Swedish government funding agency announced 325 recipients of grants in Natural and Engineering Sciences. We don’t normally write about grant announcements, but we’re flagging this one because one recipient may be familiar to our readers.

It is Peter Eklöv of Uppsala University, a co-author of a now-retracted Science paper about the potential dangers of microplastics to fish.

Eklov will receive 800,000 ($94,784 USD) each year in 2018-2020 and 900,000 ($106,632 USD) in 2021, totalling 3,300,000 ($355,440 USD). The granting agency is the Swedish Research Council, controlled by Sweden’s Ministry of Education and Research.

Eklöv‘s retracted paper — which he co-authored with Oona Lönnstedt — got significant media coverage when it first appeared in June 2016, as it suggested fish larvae prefer to eat microplastic over their own natural prey. But soon after it was published, a group of researchers raised several allegations, including that the paper contained missing data and used a problematic methodology.  Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Author of controversial retracted paper earns Swedish gov’t grant

Caught Our Notice: 4th retraction for prominent physicist (with new funding) cites falsification

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Title: Improved Cellular Specificity of Plasmonic Nanobubbles versus Nanoparticles in Heterogeneous Cell Systems

What Caught Our Attention: Nanotechnology researcher Dmitri Lapotko, whose work with lasers continues to catch media attention, has earned his fourth retraction.  As with the other three, the latest notice mentions an investigation at Rice University, but provides no specific information other than “data falsification” for images, and no indication as to the offending researcher(s). (In the past, Rice hasn’t even confirmed to us the presence of an investigation.) Only Laptoko and Ekaterina Lukianova-Hleb are common authors to all retractions. Despite these recent setbacks, Lapotko has not fared too badly in research funding.  Continue reading Caught Our Notice: 4th retraction for prominent physicist (with new funding) cites falsification

Caught Our Notice: Ethics, data concerns prompt another retraction for convicted researchers

Via Wikimedia

Title: Unravelling the influence of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) on cognitive-linguistic processing: A comparative group analysis

What Caught our Attention: RW readers might already be familiar with Caroline Barwood and Bruce Murdoch, two researchers from Australia who had the rare distinction of being criminally charged for research misconduct. Both Barwood and Murdoch received suspended sentences after being found guilty of multiple counts of fraud. In September 2014, University of Queensland announced that: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Ethics, data concerns prompt another retraction for convicted researchers

Caught Our Notice: 4th retraction for peer reviewer who stole manuscript

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Title: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, diet and gut microbiota

What Caught Our Attention: The paper was co-authored by Carmine Finelli, who in the past took responsibility for a dramatic transgression: Stealing material from an unpublished manuscript by one of its reviewers. After the paper that stole from the manuscript was retracted in 2016, Finelli earned a second retraction earlier this year — again, for plagiarism. (He’s also lost another paper from Oncotarget, which was removed without any information.) Now, a fourth retraction has popped up, for using material “published previously.”  Unsure of the source of this material, we Googled some of the phrases from the retracted article.  While we cannot say for sure,  we offer these comparisons for you — the reader — to consider: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: 4th retraction for peer reviewer who stole manuscript

Caught Our Notice: Reporter’s inquiry prompts financial disclosure in autism paper

Via Wikimedia

Title: Promoting child-initiated social-communication in children with autism: Son-Rise Program intervention effects

What caught our attention: When journalist Brendan Borrell was investigating a controversial autism treatment program for Spectrum, he came across a study where lead author Kat Houghton failed to disclose a prior relationship with the treatment center that taught the program, called Son-Rise.

The Spectrum article notes:

Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Reporter’s inquiry prompts financial disclosure in autism paper