The week at Retraction Watch featured an adventure in irony as a paper on plagiarism was retracted for…plagiarism, as well as another retraction for high-profile cancer research Robert Weinberg. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Sorry, fans of papers by Maggie Simpson and I. P. Freely, your days of chortling may be coming to an end. Springer, responding to a case last year in which it and IEEE had to eventually retract more than 120 papers created by SCIgen, is making software that detects such manuscripts freely available. From a … Continue reading An end to fake papers? New software to check for SCIgen-created manuscripts
This week at Retraction Watch featured retractions by a high-profile cancer researcher, and a loss in court for PubPeer. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The Free University of Amsterdam found Peter Nijkamp, one of the nation’s leading economists who has lost several papers for self-plagiarism, has been found guilty of “questionable research practices,” according to the newly released results of an investigation. Nijkamp has published a strongly worded criticism of the report (at least according to Google Translate, since his … Continue reading University finds Dutch economist guilty of misconduct; he responds
We are pleased to present the first in a series of articles by John R. Thomas, Jr., a lawyer at Gentry Locke [Editor’s note, 3/26/19: He has since moved to Haley, Hafemann, Magee and Thomas] who represents whistleblowers in a variety of False Claims Act cases. He writes about how whistleblowers can do the right … Continue reading So you want to be a whistleblower? A lawyer explains the process
Research director Alison Abritis earned her Ph.D. in Public Health, with a concentration in toxicology and risk assessment. Her dissertation focused on retractions and corrections, or the lack thereof, arising from misconduct findings by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). She found that less than half of the findings resulted in a published retraction or correction, and even … Continue reading Meet the Retraction Watch staff
The week at Retraction Watch featured a number of legal cases by scientists trying to suppress criticism about their work. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Marc Hauser. Dirk Smeesters. Diederik Stapel. Psychology has been home to some of the most infamous cases of fraud in recent years, and while it’s just a few bad apples who are spoiling the bunch, the field itself has seen an overall increase in retractions, according to a new paper by Jürgen Margraf appearing in Psychologische Rundschau and titled “Zur … Continue reading Psychology retractions have quadrupled since 1989: study
PLoS ONE has just issued a 12-figure correction on a paper by Mario A. Saad, who sued the American Diabetes Association unsuccessfully in an attempt to prevent it from retracting four papers in its flagship journal Diabetes. The corrections include taking out Western blots copied from another Saad paper, as well as several figures where the bands … Continue reading PLoS ONE mega-correction, but no retraction, for researcher who sued diabetes journal
This week at Retraction Watch featured a change of heart by a journal, and a look at Nature’s addition of double-blind peer review. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: