This week at Retraction Watch featured polar opposites: Two new entries in our “doing the right thing” category, and one in our plagiarism euphemism parade. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
It took five months, but in December a second retraction popped up for disgraced accounting professor James E. Hunton. Hunton resigned his teaching post at Bentley University in December of 2012. An extensive investigation by Bentley showed that not only was the data in two papers falsified. Hunton also lied about non-existent confidentiality agreements and tried … Continue reading Second retraction appears for former accounting professor James Hunton
The former director of the X-ray crystallography lab at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity to have faked findings in three papers, is once again earning a government salary, this time as a patent examiner, Retraction … Continue reading Exclusive: Former NIH lab head who faked data now working as government patent examiner
We’re pleased to share this guest post from Leonid Schneider, a cell biologist, science journalist and a prolific cartoonist whose work graces our Twitter profile and Facebook page. In it, Schneider argues for a new way to ensure accountability for publicly funded research. It has become clear that scientific dishonesty is rarely sanctioned. In the worst case scenario, manipulated or … Continue reading What if universities had to agree to refund grants whenever there was a retraction?
2014 was quite a year for Retraction Watch. We reported on hundreds of retractions — here are our top 10 — but we also took some big steps in our development. Some highlights:
This was a week of stem cell retractions, fake peer reviews, legal threats, and we announced that we’ve been awarded a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Faked peer reviews — a subject about which we’ve been writing more and more recently — are concerning enough to a number of publishers that they’ve approached the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to work together on a solution. In the past, we have reported on a number of cases in which authors were able … Continue reading Are companies selling fake peer reviews to help papers get published?
In April 2012, we wrote about a case of disputed authorship and misused data involving one Varun Kesherwani, a former postdoc at the University of Nebraska. As we reported then, Kesherwani was first author of a paper in Cytokine. The second author, Ajit Sodhi, of Banaras Hindu University, claimed to have had no knowledge of … Continue reading Former postdoc threatens Retraction Watch with lawsuit over vague defamation claims
A Korean stem cell journal has retracted a paper on a controversial Italian treatment that involves harvesting stem cells from bone marrow and injecting them back into the patient. “Stamina therapy” has been pitched as a treatment for everything from Parkinson’s disease to coma, based on a U.S. patent application filed in 2010. The Italian … Continue reading Paper on controversial stem cell “stamina therapy” retracted
The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has sanctioned Kaushik Deb, a former post-doc at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who “engaged in misconduct in science by intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly” fabricating data in papers in both Science and Nature (which ultimately rejected his manuscript). Deb was big news in 2007, when Science retracted his paper. Articles … Continue reading Faking data earns stem cell researcher a ban on federal funding