2010 was a busy year at Retraction Watch. (Well, actually the first seven months of it weren’t busy at all, since we didn’t launch until August.) We’ve published 88 posts, an average of about four per week. We no longer wonder whether we’ll have enough material to post frequently, as Adam told The New York … Continue reading Top Retraction Watch posts of 2010, and a short wish list for 2011
With some conservatives fulminating over President Obama’s eternal lust for “death panels,” we have our own case of end-of-life outrage to report. BMC Medical Ethics has retracted a November 2010 paper by two authors from Mayo Clinic whose manuscript — “End-of-life discontinuation of destination therapy with cardiac and ventilatory support medical devices: physician-assisted death or … Continue reading Irony alert: Shades of plagiarism undo med ethics paper on terminal care
Readers of this blog are aware that many of the retractions we’ve covered involve the misadventures of post-docs. That makes some superficial sense: post-docs, after all, are trainees, and therefore might be more likely to make mistakes. They’re also hungry to break into their chosen specialty, and how better to do that than by producing … Continue reading Small problem: Nano-micro journal pulls diabetes paper with phony figure
On October 20, the Journal of the American Chemical Society retracted a 2009 paper. The retraction notice for “Single Gold Nanoparticles Counter: An Ultrasensitive Detection Platform for One-Step Homogeneous Immunoassays and DNA Hybridization Assays” was somewhat opaque: This article is being retracted due to inaccurate DNA hybridization detection results caused by application of an incorrect … Continue reading Journal of the American Chemical Society retracts gold nanoparticle paper
One of the world’s leading cancer researchers, Axel Ullrich of Germany, has retracted two papers published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Ullrich, director of microbiology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, has been a central figure in many groundbreaking discoveries, from the development of genetically engineered insulin to the identification of the breast … Continue reading Leading cancer scientist retracts two papers, one 14 years old, but journal won’t say why
“Because of its growing reach and influence, Retraction Watch’s investigations and revelations have helped to address the issue of ‘unhelpful retraction notices’.” In 2020, NewsGuard said we were “unsung heroes,” one of ten sites they pointed to as “models in producing content that is truthful, compelling, credible, and transparent.” “The seamier side of academia, lying, … Continue reading What people are saying about Retraction Watch