Accusations of plagiarism spanning at least 14 years have finally caught up with Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who has had 13 papers retracted from a journal he had guest edited. The dean of the for-profit University of Atlanta has been accused of copying his own and others’ work a number of times, as we wrote in November. Here’s … Continue reading Serial plagiarist loses 13 papers
This week at Retraction Watch featured a hotly debated guest post from Leonid Schneider and two ORI findings. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Back in November 2013, we wrote about a correction in PNAS about a May 2012 paper by a group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York who, as we said at the time had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher — what we … Continue reading Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.
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?
Hindawi journal PPAR Research has pulled a cancer immunology paper after discovering it contained almost no new information. Instead, it was a Frankenstein-style stitch job, containing sentences ripped from 33 different papers. 18 of those ended up in the citations; for 15 more, the authors didn’t even do them that courtesy. You can see a meticulously color-coded call … Continue reading Franken-paper from U.S. federal contractor heads to the grave
This week at Retraction Watch witnessed the fall of a “golden boy” and a “NASA Patriot Boy.” Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
An international group of engineers lost a paper in November after the journal realized the majority of the data came from a government assessment of Australia’s energy resources without a citation. The paper, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, focused on geothermal energy, while the government report was far broader in scope. However, the lack of independent … Continue reading Geothermal paper undermined by borrowing data without citing
Prominent German diabetes researcher Kathrin Maedler has issued corrections on two papers, and told Retraction Watch she is in the process of defending the data on others. 14 of her papers have been critiqued by PubPeer commenters. The commentary, which spans from her graduate work in 2002 to a 2014 publication in Nature Medicine, includes questions about image manipulation and self-plagiarism. Laborjournal’s … Continue reading Leading diabetes researcher corrects paper as more than a dozen studies are questioned on PubPeer
The first full week of 2015 featured a few drug company-related retractions. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
An economist at Takming University of Science and Technology in Taiwan recently posted a preprint attempting to refute anonymous accusations that he repeated himself in critical reviews of textbooks. From what we understand running the paper (originally in Chinese) through Google Translate, the reviews were published in Takming University’s in-house journal, Deming Journal. The editorial board received an anonymous … Continue reading “[A]nonymous accusation…is procedurally immoral and irresponsible,” says researcher fighting allegations