PLOS ONE has retracted a paper published one month ago after readers began criticizing it for mentioning “the Creator.” The article “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living” now includes a reader comment from PLOS Staff, noting:
Sonia Melo, the recipient of an early career award from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) who fell under investigation after one of her papers was retracted, has now lost the grant. On the EMBO release announcing the nine awardees of the 2015 Installation Grants, there now appears an asterisk beside Melo’s name. At the bottom of … Continue reading EMBO awardee under investigation loses grant
This week at Retraction Watch featured seven retractions in a long-running case involving cancer research, as well as the retraction of a paper claiming a link between a vaccine and behavioral issues. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The first author of two high-profile Nature retractions about a technique to easily create stem cells has lost another paper in Nature Protocols. Haruko Obokata, once “a lab director’s dream,” according to The New Yorker, also had her PhD revoked from Waseda University last fall. After learning of concerns that two figures are “very similar” and “some of the … Continue reading STAP stem cell researcher Obokata loses another paper
Mike Rossner has made a name for himself in academic publishing as somewhat of a “manipulation detective.” As the editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, in 2002 he initiated a policy of screening all images in accepted manuscripts, causing the journal to reject roughly 1% of papers that had already passed peer review. Other … Continue reading Don’t trust an image in a scientific paper? Manipulation detective’s company wants to help.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a correction notice to a report about formaldehyde in laminate flooring, saying a mistake had caused them to significantly underestimate the health risks. The mistake: According to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the CDC sometimes didn’t convert feet to meters. Ouch. In the corrected report, the agency estimates … Continue reading CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric
The week at Retraction Watch featured a peer review nightmare come true, and a look at why publishing negative findings is hard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A peer reviewer apparently thought portions of a manuscript he was reviewing were so good he wanted them for himself. Substantial sections of a paper that Junwei Di reviewed appear in his own paper on a method for making tiny particles of silver to precise specifications. Di is a chemist at Soochow University in China. The … Continue reading Peer reviewer steals text for his own chemistry paper, gets sanctioned by journal
A Toronto hospital network is keeping two researchers’ labs closed even after an Ontario court quashed part of a misconduct finding by the institution. Some background: After the University Health Network found evidence of falsified data, Sylvia Asa stepped down as Program Medical Director of the Laboratory Medicine Program, the largest hospital diagnostic laboratory in Canada. Due to the investigation, UHN suspended the labs … Continue reading Sanction for Toronto researchers upheld despite court challenge
When a researcher encountered two papers that suggested moonlight has biological effects — on both plants and humans — he took a second look at the data, and came to different conclusions. That was the easy part — getting the word out about his negative findings, however, was much more difficult. When Jean-Luc Margot, a … Continue reading Why publishing negative findings is hard