PLOS ONE has retracted three papers after the first author admitted to submitting the manuscripts without co-authors’ consent, and an investigation suggested that two out of the three papers had received faked reviews. Last August, the same author — Lishan Wang of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University — lost two more papers (one in Tumor Biology and … Continue reading Author loses five papers, most for “compromised” peer review
A researcher banned from funding by a Canadian agency for misconduct has earned her second retraction, after a reanalysis uncovered problems with the paper’s conclusions. The retraction follows an investigation by Sophie Jamal‘s former workplace, the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, which has led to a recent retraction of a JAMA paper due to data manipulation, and a lifetime … Continue reading Second retraction for bone researcher with lifetime funding ban
We’ve been writing about retractions for six years, and things tend to fall into easily recognizable categories — plagiarism, fabricated data, rigged peer review, etc. So it’s always interesting to come across a notice sui generis, such as one that appeared in July in OncoTargets and Therapy, a Dove title, about a new way to detect … Continue reading Beg pardon? Researchers pull cancer paper because, well, um, you see …
A prominent cancer researcher in England has been banned from practicing medicine and has lost his funding from a UK charity after being found to have fabricated data in grant applications. The moves against the researcher, Thorsten Hagemann, come after investigations by the General Medical Council, akin to a U.S. state medical board, and Hagemann’s former … Continue reading UK doctor banned from practice after fabricating data in grant applications
Cell Press has dismissed accusations of image manipulation in two well-cited papers. In June 2015, we reported that the publisher was investigating anonymous allegations of more than a dozen instances of manipulation of images in the papers published in Cell and Molecular Cell in 1999 and 2001, respectively. After assessing the original high-resolution versions of images from the laboratory notebook of … Continue reading Cell Press dismisses fraud allegations in high-profile genetics papers
The week at Retraction Watch saw news of a settled lawsuit, and had us celebrating our sixth anniversary with the announcement of a new partnership. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A research fellow at Harvard Medical School whose PhD was revoked last month is no longer working in his former lab, Retraction Watch has learned. An archived version of the lab site for Alfred Goldberg from December, 2015, lists Sudarsanareddy Lokireddy as a postdoctoral fellow; however, Goldberg’s current lab site doesn’t include Lokireddy as a lab member. We contacted Goldberg’s lab, and he was unavailable … Continue reading Researcher whose PhD was revoked is no longer at Harvard lab
A medical journal in Romania has issued a lifetime ban for a researcher after retracting four of his papers. Since April, the Romanian Journal of Internal Medicine (RJIM) retracted nine papers (eight for plagiarism, one for duplication); four of these were co-authored by Manole Cojocaru, a researcher at the Titu Maiorescu University (TMU) in Bucharest, Romania. Subsequently, … Continue reading Romanian journal bans author following 4 retractions
A journal has retracted a paper for a somewhat unusual reason — and swapped the article with an entirely new paper by different authors. The journal, Materia Socio-Medica, said it’s retracting a paper about diet in dialysis patients because of some of the authors “un-ethical behaviors” in previous issues of the journal. In its place, the … Continue reading Journal retracts nutrition paper, citing authors’ “unethical behavior”
A plastic surgery journal has retracted a paper after a researcher claimed it contained three figures without his permission. According to Aesthetic Surgery Journal’s retraction notice (which is paywalled, tsk tsk), the figures were reproduced from a paper published in a Chinese journal without the original authors’ knowledge or permission: