Another busy week at Retraction Watch, with Harvard dominating the news about scientific misconduct here and elsewhere. Here’s what else was happening around the web:
Shigeaki Kato, who resigned from the University of Tokyo in 2012 after being found to have inappropriately manipulated dozens of images, has two more retractions, both in Molecular Cell. Here’s the notice for 2002’s “Nuclear Receptor Function Requires a TFTC-Type Histone Acetyl Transferase Complex:”
We have some updates on the case of more than 120 fake SCIgen conference proceedings papers that slipped into IEEE and Springer journals.
Last September we wrote about the case of Mart Bax, an anthropologist once of the Free University in Amsterdam who allegedly fabricated elements in some of his papers, and claimed to have written more than 60 that do not exist: Bax, who studied an Irish town he called Patricksville, a Dutch pilgrimage site he called … Continue reading First retraction appears for Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax
In 2005, Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada published a paper in American Psychologist making a bold and specific claim: …the authors predict that a ratio of positive to negative affect at or above 2.9 will characterize individuals in flourishing mental health. The paper made quite a splash. It has been cited 360 times, according to … Continue reading Fredrickson-Losada “positivity ratio” paper partially withdrawn
The University of Queensland has decided to get out in front of a serious research misconduct scandal by issuing a press release about the item even before, well, we could get a hold of the story. The affair involves Bruce Murdoch (all of his links at UQ are defunct), an expert in movement disorders such … Continue reading Aussie university asks for retraction, investigates former neurology researcher for fraud
A researcher at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands has been fired for research fraud, and the university is retracting two papers, the Dutch press is reporting. But don’t ask us who the employee was. That information is conspicuously absent from the medical center’s communications on the subject. Here’s a press release from Leiden, … Continue reading Leiden University fires employee for research fraud, two retractions to follow
Our mothers told us that if we used the masterbatch process, we’d go blind. And what better way to gather some updates to recent posts than to include one that involves said masterbatch process? First, a retraction John Spevacek noticed when he tried clicking on the link in a Journal of Applied Polymer Science retraction we’d … Continue reading A masterbatch: More polymer retractions, gerontology journal lifts paywall, Microbiology notices appear
A recently released survey of Belgian scientists suggests that Flemish medical researchers admit to having made up or massaged data more often than their counterparts around their world. The survey, by the Dutch science magazine Eos with the help of Joeri Tijdink, of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, and the Pascal Decroos Fund for … Continue reading One in twelve Belgian medical scientists admits having “made up and/or massaged data”: Survey
PLoS ONE has issued two Expressions of Concern on unrelated studies, each of which offers plenty to be concerned about — and not just about the research itself. One is a casualty of our old friend, Jesús Lemus, the Spanish veterinary scientist accused of fabricating his data. The article, titled “The PHA-Skin Test Reflects Acquired … Continue reading A pair of expressions of concern in PLOS ONE over vet science papers