A paper about using solar energy to make water potable has been flagged for citing God. The shout-out isn’t subtle; in fact, it’s the first sentence of the Introduction in “Solar still with condenser – A detailed review:” Water is a gift from God and it plays a key role in the development of an … Continue reading Paper calls water “a gift from God”
This week in Nature, Daniele Fanelli at Stanford made an interesting proposal: Set up a system of “self-retraction” that makes it crystal clear when a paper is pulled for honest error, rather than misconduct. Fanelli, a whose work we have frequently covered, rightly notes that honest error represents a minority of retractions — around 20%. … Continue reading Poll: Should there be a way to “self-retract” for honest error?
The Karolinska Institutet has dismissed former rising star surgeon Paolo Macchiarini from his post, effective immediately. A KI news release, dated today, states: The Staff Disciplinary Board at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to relieve Paolo Macchiarini of his duties as a researcher at KI. He is to be informed immediately that his contract has been … Continue reading Macchiarini dismissed from Karolinska
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has permanently debarred a clinical trial coordinator from working on drug applications after he swapped patient stool samples for his own, and pocketed the money earmarked for patients — along with forging patient records, lab work, and doctors’ signatures. The debarment is moot for time being — last … Continue reading FDA bans trial coordinator who pocketed patient funds and went to prison
This week at Retraction Watch featured a heartfelt essay by John Ioannidis on what he called the hijacking of evidence-based medicine, as well as the story of a peer reviewer who stole text for his own paper. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Remote Sensing Letters has retracted a 2015 paper by a pair of researchers in China because the duo was in fact a solo, and the manuscript lied about its funding source. The article, “A novel method of feature extraction and fusion and its application in satellite images classification,” purportedly was written by Da Lin and Xin … Continue reading Authorship, funding misstatements force retraction of satellite study
The New England Journal of Medicine has corrected three highly cited papers to credit researchers who played a role in the work. The papers describe a treatment in which engineered T cells fight leukemia, originally hailed as a “major advance” in the New York Times. Since the first paper appeared in 2011, co-author Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania has received more … Continue reading NEJM corrects 3 papers after prominent cancer scientist left off credit for breakthrough
A researcher who published findings questioning the safety of genetically modified organisms has lost a second paper following concerns of image manipulation. Last week, the journal animal retracted a 2010 paper by Federico Infascelli, an animal nutrition researcher at the University of Naples, which claimed to find modified genes in the milk and blood of goats who were fed genetically modified … Continue reading Another paper by GM researcher pulled over manipulation concerns
We’re sharing a relatively old retraction notice with you today, because it’s of a nature we don’t often see: A chemist apparently stole text from a manuscript he was reviewing. In spring of 2009, Yi-Chou Tsai, a chemist at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, was reviewing a paper for Nature Chemistry. At the time, he’d … Continue reading “I am really sorry:” Peer reviewer stole text for own paper
We always like to get a historical perspective on how scientists have tried to correct the record, such as this attempt in 1756 to retract a published opinion about some of the work of Benjamin Franklin. Although that 18th century note used the word “retract,” it wasn’t a retraction like what we see today, in … Continue reading What did retractions look like in the 17th century?