Two countries have recently announced plans to learn more about research misconduct, with the goal of preventing it from happening in the first place. In Japan, the effort takes the form of a joint study group among six universities, which will interview researchers who have engaged in misconduct to discover patterns and common factors for their … Continue reading Japan, Taiwan taking closer look at fraud — and how to stop it
The week at Retraction Watch featured a lawsuit threat following criticism of a popular education program, and the new editor of PLOS ONE’s explanation of why submissions are down. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Susana Gonzalez, a rising star in stem cell research, has had a rough year. In addition to being fired from her former research institute (which she is now appealing), one of her grants (totaling nearly 2 million Euros) was suspended. Most recently, she has received two new retractions in Nature Communications over figure duplications and … Continue reading Two more retractions for stem cell researcher appealing her dismissal
Chemistry researchers in China have retracted their 2016 paper after reporting that the raw data did not match what they presented in the article. The authors were attempting to develop a method to produce large amounts of a high-quality two-dimensional form of antimonene, a prized crystal structure that has been notoriously difficult to synthesize reliably. They … Continue reading Why don’t the raw data match what was reported in a chemistry paper?
The chair of a biology department who has faced years of misconduct accusations has taken another hit—a lengthy correction due to text “overlap” between one of his PNAS papers and six other articles. According to the correction, a reader contacted the journal to notify the editors that text and sentences in multiple sections of the … Continue reading Another correction for prominent cancer researcher who’s dodged accusations for decades
The timing was tight, but Sergio Gonzalez had done it. Gonzalez, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Neurosciences of Montpellier (INSERM) in France, had a paper accepted in a top journal by the end of 2015, just in time to apply for a small number of highly sought-after permanent research positions that open up in France each … Continue reading Negligence by stressed-out postdoc led to retraction of high-profile paper, supervisor says
Here’s a rather odd case: When readers raised issues about some of the images in a 2008 cancer paper, the authors issued a correction last year. But when readers asked additional questions about the corrected images, the authors decided to retract the paper entirely, along with its correction. Both the original and corrected versions were questioned on … Continue reading Huh? Cancer paper gets retracted because of its correction
The week at Retraction Watch featured three new ways companies are trying to scam authors, and a look at why one journal is publishing a running tally of their retractions. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A group of researchers in France has been forced to retract their 2002 article in the Journal of Virology after learning that the paper was marred by multiple image problems. The paper, “P0 of Beet Western Yellows Virus Is a Suppressor of Posttranscriptional Gene Silencing,” came from the lab of Veronique Ziegler-Graff, a plant biologist at the … Continue reading 15-year old paper pulled for image problems
With so many journals out there, it can be hard to know which ones are legitimate, and which ones have adopted so-called “predatory” practices – publishing anything as long as authors can pay. In this guest post, computer scientist Jacob Beal at BBN Technologies highlights one way he believes software companies may indirectly endorse questionable publishers … Continue reading Should software companies choose not to work with predatory publishers?