Three years after work from his lab was the subject of “serious allegations,” a professor at Deakin University in Australia has left his post, Retraction Watch has learned.
Pro tip to would-be fraudsters: If you’re going to submit new figures to support your claims, make sure they’re not obviously fake.
That’s a lesson a group of cancer researchers learned the hard way for their 2016 article in DNA and Cell Biology titled “miR-106a-5p suppresses the proliferation, migration, and invasion of osteosarcoma cells by targeting HMGA2.” The corresponding author was Fang Ji, of The Second Military Medical University in Shanghai.
The paper appeared on PubPeer earlier this year, where a commentor noted dryly:
Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters.
The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China.
The authors of an October 2020 paper on the genetics of thyroid cancer are getting praise from the journal for retracting their article after learning that it contained a critical error.
Journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry have retracted four articles by a researcher in China for a range of misconduct, including manipulation of images, fabrication of authors and more.
The papers were written by Rijun Gui, of Qingdao University and formerly of the School of Chemistry and Molecules Engineering at East China University of Science and Technology, in Shanghai, and published in 2013 and 2014. Gui has a sizable entry on PubPeer, where many of his studies have come under scrutiny for years. Together, the four papers have been cited nearly 150 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
It’s not quite Rashomon, but each of the retraction notices adds a bit of detail to the story.
Here’s a Halloween tale that will drive authors batty.
A psychology journal has retracted two papers from the same group of authors in Spain because it published the articles inadvertently. But in doing so, the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, where the two articles were never supposed to appear but did, managed to botch the retractions, too.
If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.
In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication.
