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:
Swiss researchers have retracted an abstract in Clinical Neurophysiology because only one of them actually knew about the paper — and what he submitted had “several mistakes.” The abstract, about electric impulses in the brain of comatose patients, originally appeared as a poster at the June 2014 joint meeting of multiple Swiss neuroscience societies. It was submitted by first author Alexandre … Continue reading Neuro journal pulls comatose brain abstract due to “several mistakes”
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
A new paper in the MDPI journal Publications reports that the only controlled study on the effect of giving COPD patients Omega-3 has been cited 52 times since being retracted. Of those, only two mentioned the retraction. In 2005, Chest published an article that found that COPD patients who took omega-3 supplements for 2 years experienced improvements in their condition, … Continue reading More evidence scientists continue to cite retracted papers
An environmental journal has retracted a paper on a technology that helps degrade explosives released into soil, because the first author never got the permission of his “co-authors” — oh, and used data that were “illegally obtained,” according to one of the slighted co-authors. According to the EPA, more than 30 sites around the country are … Continue reading Forged author list blows up explosives contamination paper
ISPACS’ Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Application, whose website promises “very fast publication,” has pulled a paper for ripping off an article posted on arXiv.org. Their plagiarism wasn’t exactly subtle. Here’s the abstract from the paper on arXiv.org: We introduce and study the class of weak almost limited operators. We establish a characterization of pairs of Banach … Continue reading Math paper subtracted for plagiarism
Mario A. Saad, who last year retracted a paper for plagiarism, is now suing the American Diabetes Association over four expressions of concern in its flagship journal, Diabetes. As reported in the Boston Business Journal, Saad’s lawsuit claims that his institution, the State University of Campinas, investigated two articles at the journal’s behest. The American Diabetes … Continue reading Diabetes researcher sues journal to prevent retractions of papers cited more than 600 times
On Friday, we reported on the retraction and republication of a paper in The Lancet. One of the paper’s authors, Yale’s Harlan Krumholz, took issue with how we characterized the reason for the retraction. We offered him a chance to write a guest post about the situation, which we are pleased to publish below. Please … Continue reading Retraction Watch “mischaracterized the reason for a retraction:” Harlan Krumholz responds to a post
This week at Retraction Watch featured polar opposites: Two new entries in our “doing the right thing” category, and one in our plagiarism euphemism parade. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: