A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles.
The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and promoted by the Art of Living Foundation, which describes itself thusly:
Eric Lam, a highly-published cancer specialist, has been fired from his post at Imperial College London following a university investigation that found misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.
However, the new retraction marks the first such retraction for the researcher, whose LinkedIn page states that he is now affiliated with Sun Yat-Sen University, in China. According to an Imperial College London spokesperson:
A Japanese anesthesiologist has been found guilty of fabricating data and other misconduct in 142 articles, leading to his termination and the sanction of several of his co-authors.
Showa University says its investigation into Hironobu Ueshima, the existence of which we first reported on last June, found that the prolific researcher had doctored his results, falsified his findings and tinkered with authorship.
The university’s report on the case is available here, in Japanese, and a similar report from the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists is available here in English. The JSA report cites 142 papers — including 120 letters to the editor, 12 original papers, and 9 case reports — with evidence of misconduct including fabricated data and improper authorship. The investigation also found evidence of misconduct in several unpublished studies by Ueshima. By our count, he has six retractions to date.
The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.
The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.
On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:
A journalist in Washington, D.C. prompted a correction in both Nature and the New York Times after finding that the lead author of a paper on fish farming failed to disclose financial ties to one of the world’s largest aquaculture companies.
The paper caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the findings. It also grabbed the attention of Tim Schwab, who noticed something a bit, well, fishy, about the study.
A scientist in Japan has lost her doctoral degree from Kyoto University after an investigation determined that she had plagiarized in her thesis.
According to the university, Jin Jing, who received her degree in September 2012 in human and environmental studies, has become the first person at the institution to have a doctorate revoked. In a statement about the move, Kyoto University president Nagahiro Minato said:
These journals — which can make millions of dollars for their illegitimate publishers — exploit vulnerabilities in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, by making themselves look close enough to real journals, often exploiting the real ISSN and other metadata of those titles. That, in turn, entices potentially unknowing authors whose careers may depend on publishing in journals in major indexes.
Now into the mix comes Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. This time, the tip-off, discovered by Russian scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky, was almost unbelievable: an article about the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet resistance to Germany’s 1941 invasion — in a journal specializing in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology.
The now-infamous “TikTok Doc” who was embroiled in a recently settled sexual harassment suit has lost a 2020 paper on, wait for it, faculty development after his co-authors decided that the collaboration risked “reputational damage” to themselves and dismissal of the work.
Jason Campbell was an anesthesiology resident at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, when he became a social media darling. Clips of him dancing in the hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic went viral on TikTok — before Campell was accused of sexually harassing a social worker at the Portland VA hospital, where the anesthesiologist sometimes worked. (Campbell left the institution and reportedly now lives and works in Florida.)
All rejection is hard to take. But, as one psychology researcher has found out, “having a paper rejected half a year after publication is something new …”
Since then, the paper has been viewed more than 2,400 times and cited a handful of times.
But on May 17, Fried received an email from the journal, which is published by Taylor & Francis, with unfortunate news: His article, according to the support administrator, was “unsuitable for publication.”
