We’re pleased to introduce readers to Alice Dreger, a historian of science and medicine at the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program in Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Her new book is “Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science,” out this week from Penguin Press. Read to the end for … Continue reading Yes, we are seeing more attacks on academic freedom: guest post by historian of science and medicine
Researcher Alison Abritis earned her Ph.D. in Public Health, with a concentration in toxicology and risk assessment. Her dissertation focused on retractions and corrections, or the lack thereof, arising from misconduct findings by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). She found that less than half of the findings resulted in a published retraction or correction, and even fewer … Continue reading Meet the Retraction Watch staff
Drug researchers in India have lost their 2013 paper in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters because the first author fabricated findings. The article, by a group from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, in Gujarat, was attempting to synthesize and screen novel clot-busting drugs; one compound exhibited the same activity as aspirin or warfarin, but … Continue reading Misconduct dissolves paper on possible clot-busters
The American Heart Association’s journal Circulation has issued an expression of concern for a paper about the molecular underpinnings of arrhythmias that was co-authored by a biomedical engineer who committed fraud on a massive scale. According to an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), former Vanderbilt engineer Igor Dzhura faked nearly 70 images and drastically over-estimated … Continue reading Heart journal issues expression of concern after fraud report
This week at Retraction Watch featured a change of heart by a journal, and a look at Nature’s addition of double-blind peer review. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
There are a number of fields that seem to punch above their weight on Retraction Watch: Anesthesiology, home to the world record holder (and runner-up), and psychology, home to Diederik Stapel and others. But the red-hot field of stem cell research is another that makes frequent appearances, last year’s STAP controversy being particularly prominent. There’s … Continue reading Are retractions more frequent in stem cell research?
David Vaux, a cell biologist at the Walter + Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, explains how Nature could do more to remove bias from the peer review process. He previously wrote about his decision to retract a paper. Last week, Nature announced that they are to offer authors of papers submitted to … Continue reading David Vaux: Nature’s decision to add double-blind peer review is good, but could be better
American Diabetes Association 1, Mario Saad 0. As reported by the National Law Journal, a federal judge in Boston has denied Saad’s requests to stop the ADA’s flagship journal, Diabetes, from publishing expressions of concern about four of Saad’s papers, and to prevent the journal from retracting the studies. Saad filed suit against the ADA on … Continue reading Judge denies motion by researcher to quash Diabetes expressions of concern
Fifteen days after publishing a widely-criticized article linking anecdotal health problems to the HPV vaccine Gardasil, the Toronto Star has issued a retraction. The Page 1 story, “A wonder drug’s dark side,” was full of health horror stories from women who became sick “sometime after” the vaccine, as the retraction notes – twitching limbs, feeding tubes, even death. Each of these … Continue reading A rare event: Toronto Star retracts fear-mongering vaccine story
The International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine has taken a hard stance against overlapping publications in a recent retraction note and editorial. Shortly after publishing a paper about the glycosylation patterns of endothelial cells in usual interstitial pneumonia, IJOEM editors discovered that it had been accepted by the Scholarly Journal of Biological Science two weeks before … Continue reading Journal runs retraction, editorial over duplicate submission of pathology paper