Category: image manipulation

Prominent physicist loses four more papers for duplication

A leading physicist in India has lost four more papers for duplication, after colleagues lodged a complaint against him.

According to the most recent retraction notices, issued by Applied Surface Science, the four papers duplicated several figures and portions of text from the authors’ previous works. Although the notices do not single out a responsible party, last year the Mumbai Mirror reported that first and corresponding Naba K. Sahoo had been accused of duplication by colleagues at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), part of Indian government’s Department of Atomic Energy.

(In a bizarre twist, Sahoo also made the news recently for getting into a fist fight with another BARC scientist.)

Sahoo received two retractions last year for duplication, sometimes inelegantly referred to as “self-plagiarism.” All six of his retractions affect papers published by Applied Surface Science between 2005 and 2007.

The first retraction notice explains that a 2006 paper lifted portions of text from an earlier paper by Sahoo: Continue reading Prominent physicist loses four more papers for duplication

Fired Pfizer cancer researcher loses final two of five papers pegged for retraction

PLOS ONE has retracted the last of five papers by a former employee of Pfizer, who the company fired after determining she had duplicated data.

After its investigation, Pfizer asked journals to retract five papers co-authored by Min-Jean Yin. Last week, PLOS ONE retracted the final two remaining papers. Both notices cite image duplications; Yin contacted the journal about one paper, but did not comment on the other retraction.

Here’s the notice for “miR-221 Promotes Tumorigenesis in Human Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cells:”

Continue reading Fired Pfizer cancer researcher loses final two of five papers pegged for retraction

Three figures in blood pressure paper were manipulated, says journal

A pharmacology journal has retracted a 2011 paper after concluding images in three figures had been manipulated.

According to the British Journal of Pharmacology, four of the five authors claim they played no role in the manipulation. There is no comment from the remaining author, first author Ian Morecroft, a research associate at the University of Glasgow.

Here’s more from the notice, which says an investigation at the University of Glasgow is ongoing:

Continue reading Three figures in blood pressure paper were manipulated, says journal

Once-prominent researcher logs retraction following misconduct finding

A researcher who resigned from the University of Dundee in Scotland after it concluded he was guilty of misconduct has issued his first retraction.

According to an internal email to staff forwarded to us last year, the university concluded that Robert Ryan had misrepresented clinical data and images in 12 different publications. The first retraction, published by Molecular Microbiology, cites image duplications in multiple figures.

Here’s the full notice:

Continue reading Once-prominent researcher logs retraction following misconduct finding

Journals retract paper, flag two others by cancer doc under investigation

Carlo Croce

This weekend, Carlo Croce had some reprieve from the misconduct accusations that have followed him for years (recently described in a lengthy article in the New York Times) and that have prompted his university to re-open an investigation. On Sunday, he received a prestigious award from the American Association for Cancer Research, honoring his work.

But the moment may have been short-lived. Today, Croce received two expressions of concern (EOCs) from PNAS for two well-cited papers published over a decade ago, on which Croce — chair of the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics at The Ohio State University (OSU) — is last author. The two EOCs cite concerns over duplicated bands. What’s more, another journal recently decided to retract one of his papers, citing figures that didn’t represent the results of the experiments.

PNAS chose to issue EOCs, rather than retractions or corrections, because the authors didn’t agree that the bands were duplicated, according to executive editor Diane Sullenberger. She explained how the journal learned of the issues with the two papers: Continue reading Journals retract paper, flag two others by cancer doc under investigation

Five retractions for engineering duo in South Korea over duplication, fraudulent data

An engineering student in South Korea and a professor have retracted five papers from four different journals for reasons ranging from figure duplication to manipulated or fraudulent data.

Jae Hyo Park, who is pursuing his PhD, and Seung Ki Joo, a professor in the department of material science and engineering at Seoul National University in South Korea, appear on all five papers as first and last author, respectively.

According to an official at IOP Publishing, the retractions began when a third party contacted them last March about “potential misconduct” in a paper published earlier that year in one of its journals—Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. The IOP official Simon Davies explained: Continue reading Five retractions for engineering duo in South Korea over duplication, fraudulent data

Research misconduct finding — which university won’t discuss — leads to second retraction for prominent physicist

A rising star in nanotechnology, Dmitri Lapotko, has received his second retraction within a month over “a finding of research misconduct” that the university will apparently only disclose on a need-to-know basis.

According to the notice, the journal’s editor and publisher issued the retraction after Lapotko’s former institution—Rice University in Houston—notified them of research misconduct and cited figure duplication issues, which meant the results “should not be relied upon and may be scientifically unsound.”

We recently covered the Belarusian physicist’s first retraction in the journal Theranostics, in which an official at Rice would not confirm a misconduct inquiry, telling us that, “Rice University’s investigations of research misconduct are confidential.”

This time, however, the retraction notice explicitly states that a Rice University research integrity officer reported research misconduct to the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL). We contacted the official, B.J. Almond, who still stuck to the original script: Continue reading Research misconduct finding — which university won’t discuss — leads to second retraction for prominent physicist

Author duplicated a figure in three papers; two get retracted

Two journals have retracted two papers by the same group within months of each other, after editors were independently tipped off that they contained duplicated figures representing different experiments.

The two papers were published by PLOS ONE and The Egyptian Journal of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (EJBMB) in 2015 and 2014, respectively. According to the PLOS ONE paper’s corresponding author, last author Saad A. Noeman from Tanta University in Egypt used the same Figure 1 in both papers, along with another 2013 paper in EJBMB.

Corresponding author Yasser S. El-Sayed, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at Damanhour University in Egypt, told us he learned of this issue after a reader brought the figure manipulation and duplication concerns to PLOS ONE’s attention.

El-Sayed said that he tried to figure out what had happened.

Continue reading Author duplicated a figure in three papers; two get retracted

Plant scientist logs 4 more notices over figure errors

Researchers in China have retracted a paper and corrected three others in a plant journal, citing problems with multiple figures.

Lixin Zhang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, is corresponding author on all four papers, published by Plant Physiology. We’ve reported on three retractions and two corrections from Lixin Zhang and some of the same co-authors, bringing Zhang’s total to five retractions and four corrections, by our count.

According to the retraction notice, the authors agreed to pull the article because of figure-related “irregularities and inappropriate data handling” — but despite these issues, they remain confident that their conclusions are still valid.

Here’s the latest retraction notice, issued this February, for “Cooperation of LPA3 and LPA2 Is Essential for Photosystem II Assembly in Arabidopsis:”  Continue reading Plant scientist logs 4 more notices over figure errors

President of Taiwan university to step down amidst investigation

Pan-Chyr Yang

The president of a top university in Taiwan has announced he will resign from his post at the end of his first term in June.

President Pan-chyr Yang of National Taiwan University (NTU) has opted not to seek a second term as president given two recent investigations — one which concluded last month and one which is ongoing — into allegations of misconduct in papers he co-authored.

Despite being cleared of misconduct in the investigation conducted by his university, Yang felt that the scandal had left a stain on NTU’s reputation, which he hoped to restore by stepping down as president. Here’s more from Focus Taiwan: Continue reading President of Taiwan university to step down amidst investigation