It’s fair to say that we’ve been watching Elsevier over the past two-plus years, and we’ve also known they’ve been watching us. Last year, Tom Reller, the company’s vice president of global public relations, wrote that we “represent the new breed of science watchdog that is able to promote the results of their own investigations … Continue reading Elsevier on Retraction Watch: “scholarly publishing is better for it”
A paper published online the other day in the Journal of Medical Ethics puts some numbers on an issue near and dear to Retraction Watch: How transparent are retraction notices when it comes to misconduct? David Resnik and Gregg Dinse, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, looked at the 208 cases closed by … Continue reading Surprise, surprise: Study says retraction notices often aren’t honest about misconduct
Retraction Watch turns two on Friday (August 3), and while you might be stumped about what to get us, we’ll make things easy for you. All we want to mark the occasion is your … expertise. In their August 2012 issue, The Scientist published an opinion piece in which we call for a “Transparency Index” … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Transparency Index
We apologize for what must seem like a constant drip, drip, drip, but we have three more retractions from Diederik Stapel to report, all from the European Journal of Social Psychology. The first, in order of publication date, involves a 2006 paper by Stapel and co-author Camille Johnson — whose name has appeared on several … Continue reading Three more retractions for Diederik Stapel
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has posted another of its inscrutable and opaque retraction notices, this one for a study first published in September 2011. The retraction reads in full:
Sometimes, the full story of scientific misdeeds isn’t clear until several retraction notices appear. Take the case of a group of Vietnamese astrophysicists led by Thong Duc Le. If you were to read a Physics Letters B retraction notice about one of the group’s papers, “Search for cosmological time variation of the fine-structure constant using … Continue reading Astrophysics retraction trail includes paper that plagiarized another already retracted for…plagiarism
Cytokine had an interesting retraction notice this year that points up the pitfalls — perhaps necessary, perhaps not — that journals can step in when they give authors the benefit of the doubt. Here’s the story: A doctoral student named Varun Kesherwani was working in the lab of Ajit Sodhi, a U.S.-trained and well-published cell biologist … Continue reading Authors’ public dispute over retraction notice in Cytokine ends in a draw, bruises journal
If Retraction Watch was actually a business, as opposed — for the moment, anyway — to a labor of love for two guys with day jobs, 2011 would have been a very good year for business. It was a year that will probably see close to 400 retractions, including a number of high-profile ones, once … Continue reading The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011
When is a retraction not a retraction? Why, when it’s a correction, of course — like the one the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases issued this month: In the article Reassortment of Ancient Neuraminidase and Recent Hemagglutinin in Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Virus (P. Bhoumik, A.L. Hughes), errors were made in selection of the hemagglutinin (HA) and … Continue reading Retraction (in all but name) of flu paper raises eyebrows
Four neurology journals have retracted articles by a Japanese researcher who admitted to having made “mistakes” in his handling of data. Although the cases are related, the way the journals have handled the notices is startlingly different. One chose to say nothing, one chose to say little, while two went for full — or at … Continue reading The ‘Goldilocks’ retraction? Revealing differences in how several neurology journals handled related problems