In what has become an annual tradition, our friends at The Scientist asked us to round up what we thought were the biggest retractions of the last 12 months. Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by some of the 39 retractions we’ve seen of COVID-19 studies. But that’s not the whole list.
Don’t tell the aquatic beetles in the family Grouvellinus Champion 1923, but their number just got a little smaller. Officially speaking, that is. Unofficially, keep that place setting at the holiday table. Well, don’t, if you’re under travel restrictions for COVID-19. You get the picture.
A journal has retracted a 2019 paper describing the discovery of a new member of the family, part of a “citizen science” (or “taxon expedition”) effort to collect samples of the insects in the remote Maliau Basin of Borneo, over a bureaucratic dispute.
A legal scholar with a peripatetic and checkered career — and questionable CV — now has 23 retractions by our count.
Dimitris Liakopoulos, about whom we first wrote in July, has claimed to have held professorships in Europe and the United States, including at Columbia Law School, Stetson University and Tufts University, as well as authorship on some 600 papers. But journals have been retracting his articles over concerns about plagiarism and concerns about his stated academic affiliations. For example, Tufts told us in July that he had never been affiliated with the school.
Liakopoulos appears to have locked his ORCID ID, making public scrutiny of his scholarly output more difficult. But commenters on PubPeer have taken aim at several of his papers over the past few months.
A team of researchers in England has retracted a 2014 paper after a graduate student affiliated with the group found a fatal error while trying to replicate parts of the work — and which might affect similar studies by other scientists, as well.
The article, “Perceptual load affects spatial tuning of neuronal populations in human early visual cortex,” was written by Benjamin de Haas, then of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London, and his colleagues at UCL.
An undergraduate student in the United Kingdom has taken to task the editors of a purportedly scholarly journal for having published more than 100 papers by a Maltese researcher with a deep affinity for Star Trek.
In a Dec. 8, 2020, letter to the editors of Early Human Development (EHD), Hampton Gaddy, a BA student at the University of Oxford, accuses the journal of having published “a large number of unprofessional articles” by Victor Grech, of the University of Malta.
Grech is a pediatric cardiologist, and, evidently a huge Star Trek fan. He’s also a prolific author, and seems to have turned EHD into something of a personal fanzine. As Gaddy notes in his letter, Grech has written at least 113 papers in EHD, an Elsevier title, 57 as sole author:
An associate dean at the University of Miami stepped down from his post two weeks after agreeing to sanctions stemming from a finding of misconduct by a government watchdog, Retraction Watch has learned.
Yesterday, we reported that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Charles Downs, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in six federal grant applications while on the faculty of the University of Arizona.
Downs was appointed associate dean of Miami’s nursing school in 2018, and stepped down from the position on December 4, according to a university spokesperson. He remains an associate professor at the school.
The authors of a meta-analysis on predicting cardiovascular disease have retracted the paper because it included a study that was retracted between the time they submitted their article and the date it was published.
If only there were a repository of retracted articles that authors and editors could check to see if the references in the studies they publish are still reliable.
A former researcher at the University of Arizona who is now was until last week an associate dean at the University of Miami “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in six federal grant applications, according to a new finding by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Charles A. Downs’ work “focuses on acute lung injury and pulmonary diseases,” according to a 2018 press release from the University of Miami announcing his appointment. He “neither admits nor denies ORI’s findings of research misconduct,” the ORI announced today. The agency said that Downs
A pharmacy researcher at Tehran University of Medical Sciences has had three papers retracted, and one corrected, because he duplicated his other articles.
Narges Shokri, of the School of Pharmacy of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences, also in Iran, is an author of the three retracted papers, but not the corrected paper in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine.
Here’s the notice for “Comparison of Calcium Phosphate and Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles as Dermal Penetration Enhancers for Albumin,” in the Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences: