The authors of a paper in a cancer journal have retracted it after acknowledging they lifted parts of it from a thesis about an unrelated topic.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Regulation of RUNX3 Expression by DNA Methylation in Prostate Cancer,” originally published in July 2020 in Cancer Management and Research, a Dove title:
Continue reading Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject
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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 206. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: A White House official’s retraction; ‘bosom peril;’ nonsense with a forged authorship
Sometime in early 2019, a postdoc in a veterinary microbiology lab at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman came to suspect that a research assistant in her lab was fabricating data.
The postdoc had noticed that the research assistant’s experiments always produced positive results, while hers were always negative. And the experiments she performed with materials from the assistant gave “alarmingly inconsistent” results for no apparent reason, she said in an interview with an investigation committee.
She brought her concerns to a senior researcher, and the research assistant, Ryan Evanoff, was asked to “detail what he had done,” but apparently nothing came of it.
The supervisor indicated that the postdoc’s initial message outlining her concerns “was not clear enough,” but the postdoc thought she’d been clear and says she’d been “extremely careful” due to the severity of the situation.
Continue reading Exclusive: How a researcher faked data and gaslit a labmate for years
A virology journal has issued an expression of concern about a paper claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can damage DNA after one member of the research team raised reservations about the reported findings.
The article, “SARS-CoV-2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” was written by a pair of scientists at institutions in Sweden and published in MDPI’s Viruses (as Vincent Racaniello of TWiV would say, the kind that make you sick).
The paper has received a fair amount of attention – particularly among vaccine skeptics who, as critics noted, used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe – generating enough buzz on social media and in the news to make it into the top 5% of all articles tracked by Altmetric. TWiV even devoted part of an episode of the show to the findings.
According to the journal:
Continue reading COVID-19 spike protein paper earns an expression of concern
The publisher Frontiers has retracted at least a dozen papers in the last month, after announcing an “extensive internal investigation” into “potentially falsified research.”
Here’s an example of a notice, this one from Frontiers in Endocrinology for “Overexpression of microRNA-216a-3p Accelerates the Inflammatory Response in Cardiomyocytes in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Targeting IFN-α2,” which was originally published in November 2020:
Continue reading Frontiers retracts a dozen papers, many more expected
The authors of a paper on “nudge experiments” published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) plan to correct it following questions about some of its conclusions and citations, Retraction Watch has learned.
Following up on comments by Aaron Charlton and Nick Brown, Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman, who is deeply skeptical of the findings, raised several questions about the paper in a post on January 7. Among them were that the paper cites 11 articles by food marketing researcher Brian Wansink, whom Retraction Watch readers may recall resigned from his post at Cornell following an investigation and has had 17 papers retracted, one of them twice.
Gelman also notes that the paper cites a paper by Dan Ariely and colleagues that was retracted in September. We’ll focus here on the inclusion of that reference.
Co-corresponding author Tobias Brosch, of the University of Geneva, responded within hours of Gelman’s post, writing in part:
Continue reading Authors to correct PNAS ‘nudge’ paper that cites now-retracted article in the same journalWould you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 206. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: A museum of scientific misconduct?; authorship misconduct; uproar over renamed phyla
Talk about cultural misappropriation.
A cultural studies journal has retracted a 2021 article on storytelling among the Quandamooka people in Australia for widespread plagiarism.
The article, “Reconceptualising a Quandamooka Storyweave of language reclamation,” appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies in July and was written by a group led by Sandra Delaney, a scholar of indigenous languages in Australia.
As the journal, a Sage title, makes clear, the article went through the typical course of peer review and, presumably, some editing – which somehow managed to miss plagiarised text from not one but at least eight sources. Three of those involved rip-offs from unpublished university theses, while the rest were from published articles.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Paper on ‘language reclamation’ and decolonization plagiarized from eight papers, journal acknowledgesA journal has slapped an expression of concern on a 2021 paper reporting on the utility of self-administered “battlefield” acupuncture in soldiers, citing readers who said the FDA has not approved the devices for that use – a point the authors, who object to the move, dismissed as irrelevant and misleading.
The study, which appeared in Medical Acupuncture, looked at the experiences of a dozen veterans at an Ohio VA hospital who’d purportedly self-administered acupuncture to treat chronic pain. According to this 2010 article from the U.S. military:
Continue reading Authors unhappy as “battlefield acupuncture” paper earns an expression of concern
A cancer journal with a history of batch retractions has pulled 15 articles dating back to 2014 after concluding that they contained manipulated or misused images.
As we reported in 2017, Tumor Biology was forced to retract 107 papers that had been corrupted by fake peer review – a record at the time. That move had followed a similar, if smaller, sweep in 2016 by the journal, which was owned by Springer but purchased by SAGE in December 2016 after the more massive cleanse.
Continue reading Cancer journal with hefty retraction record retracts another 15