Category: studies about retractions

Catching up: OSU “missed fraud,” Dipak Das lost tenured professorship, Ivan on NPR’s Science Friday

Terry Elton, via OSU
Terry Elton, via OSU

We have a few follow-ups from stories we’ve recently covered:

Terry Elton case initially chalked up to “disorganization,” not misconduct

Ohio State University (OSU), which along with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) recently sanctioned a pharmacy professor for image manipulation, “failed at first to recognize his deception,” according to an investigation by The Columbus Dispatch based on university documents.

The piece, which quotes Ivan, reveals that OSU needed some prompting from the ORI before it concluded that Terry Elton was guilty of misconduct, and not just unintentional errors that he at one point blamed on a research technician who lost her job in October 2011: Continue reading Catching up: OSU “missed fraud,” Dipak Das lost tenured professorship, Ivan on NPR’s Science Friday

Owner of Science Fraud site, suspended for legal threats, identifies himself, talks about next steps

Paul Brookes, via URMC
Paul Brookes, via URMC

One of the owners of the whistleblower site Science Fraud, which went dark yesterday in response to legal threats, has identified himself, and explained what happened.

In a post on his personal blog (since removed)* — give the whole post a read if it reappears — Paul Brookes, a scientist at the University of Rochester, gives the history: Continue reading Owner of Science Fraud site, suspended for legal threats, identifies himself, talks about next steps

Facing legal threats, Science Fraud temporarily suspends posting

As regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed, a number of sites have sprung up recently to examine — quite critically — papers that other scientists say are dodgy. There’s Abnormal Science, for example, which has not been updated since last February, and a Japanese whistleblower took to YouTube to demonstrate what was wrong with two dozen studies.

The people running these sites have provided a useful service, in that they often nudge journals along and lead to corrections and retractions. When they’ve pointed out issues with papers, we always try to link back to them for details.

But these sites can also have sharp elbows, particularly those that are anonymous, and one site launched last summer, Science Fraud, has drawn unwanted legal attention from scientists whose work has been questioned. Last month, the site earned its first cease-and-desist letter. Today, the site has suspended posts, and deactivated all of its older entries. Here’s the post announcing the move: Continue reading Facing legal threats, Science Fraud temporarily suspends posting

How many retractions were there in 2012? And, some shattered records

retractionwatch3We’ve learned a lot about retractions in 2012, from the fact that most retractions are due to misconduct to the effects they can have on funding. We’ve seen eyebrow-raising reasons for retractions, from a hack of Elsevier’s peer review system to a researcher peer reviewing his own papers, to massive fraud in psychology to a math paper retracted because some of made “no sense mathematically.”

So as the year winds to a close, we wanted to take a look at retractions by the numbers.

1. How many retractions in 2012? Continue reading How many retractions were there in 2012? And, some shattered records

How is Elsevier promoting ethical publishing? A guest post

elsevierAs Retraction Watch readers know, we cover Elsevier’s journals frequently, including a story just last week about their peer review system being hacked.  And they’ve written about us, too. So we’re pleased to present a guest post by Elsevier’s Linda Lavelle, General Counsel-North America, about the publisher’s take on plagiarism and other unethical behavior — and what the company is doing to prevent it.

Protecting Good Science: Upholding Publishing Ethics

If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who herself has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer? That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer, MD, found himself facing recently. Dr. Shafer, editor-in-chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia, learned that authors of a 2008 case report in his publication had lifted two-and-a-half paragraphs of text from a 2004 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.

Wait.  Stop.  Does the preceding paragraph sound familiar?  Chances are, no.  But in fact, I lifted it, word for word, from a piece by Adam Marcus in Anesthesiology News, January 2011. (A similar post also ran here at Retraction Watch, with attribution.) Does this kind of cut-and-paste happen in research publishing today?  Sadly, yes.  According to Science (Vol. 324, May 22, 2009), an estimated 200,000 of 17 million articles in the Medline database may have been duplicates or plagiarized. One percent may seem like a relatively small incidence.  But the sheer number is disturbing. Continue reading How is Elsevier promoting ethical publishing? A guest post

Serbian scientists decry systematic plagiarism, predatory publishing

serbiaAn open letter to the Serbian science ministry – coinciding with the new government’s first 100 days in office – and an accompanying petition signed by 850 scientists so far, makes for pretty dim reading on the state of research ethics in Serbia.

The systematic and apparently state-endorsed practice of artificially boosting one’s ratings in the national evaluation system, which drives promotions and helps set salaries, has led to a range of abuses that are promoting mediocrity while driving scientific talent out of the country, says the letter, published in late October.

The authors say that the offenses that have proliferated over the last decade, and which are being “systematically hidden” under what the letter says are bad policies set by the science ministry, include: Continue reading Serbian scientists decry systematic plagiarism, predatory publishing

After retracted study’s cited, editors ask, “time to add scientific integrity to the downside of print on paper?”

JneuranesAs we — and others — have written, retracted articles don’t necessarily creep off to some little island somewhere never to be heard from again. After all, the electronic versions of about a third of retracted papers aren’t marked as retracted. Sometimes, like Napoleon, those papers return from exile to wreak havoc: They get cited as if they had never been retracted.

To wit: The Journal of Neurosurgical Anesthesiology has published a letter to the editor regarding a 2012 article by a group of Italian researchers. The topic of the paper in question was “Perioperative pregabalin for postoperative pain control and quality of life after major spinal surgery.”

That happens to have been an area of interest for one Scott Reuben, a Massachusetts anesthesiologist and pain specialist turned federal inmate who was, Continue reading After retracted study’s cited, editors ask, “time to add scientific integrity to the downside of print on paper?”

Why aren’t there more retractions in business and economics journals?

jaebrA new paper has catalogued retractions over the past few decades in business and economics journals — and hasn’t found very many.

In “Retraction, Dishonesty and Plagiarism: Analysis of a Crucial Issue for Academic Publishing, and the Inadequate Responses from Leading Journals in Economics and Management Disciplines,” which just went online in the Journal of Applied Economics and Business Research (JAEBR), Solmaz Filiz Karabag and Christian Berggren identified 31 retractions in business journals dating back to 2005, and just six in economics journals, dating back to 2009.

The numbers in business journals are even lower when you consider that Continue reading Why aren’t there more retractions in business and economics journals?

Tie Retraction Syndrome? Fat chance

Every now and then, we’re accused of “gotcha journalism” here at Retraction Watch. But here’s the story of a paper that we hope you’ll agree is “gotcha” science of the best kind, involving a different kind of retraction. The research is of, shall we say, a pressing problem known as Tie Retraction Syndrome, or TRS for short, brought to the world’s attention by a group of ophthalmologists in Germany and the UK.

According to the paper in Orbit, TRS is: Continue reading Tie Retraction Syndrome? Fat chance

Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study

October, apparently, is “studies of retractions month.” First there was a groundbreaking study in PNAS, then an NBER working paper, and yesterday PLoS Medicine alerted us to a paper their sister journal, PLoS ONE, published last week, “A Comprehensive Survey of Retracted Articles from the Scholarly Literature.”

The study, by Michael L. Grieneisen and Minghua Zhang, is comprehensive indeed, reaching further back into the literature than others we’ve seen, and also including more disciplines: Continue reading Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study