A cancer researcher faked a dozen images in three papers and a conference presentation while employed at Harvard teaching hospitals, according to a new report by a federal U.S. watchdog.
A stem cell researcher in Japan could end up with 23 retractions after officials at his former institution confirmed that he’d committed research misconduct in nearly two dozen papers.
According to a report released last week by Aichi Gakuin University, Nobuaki Ozeki misused images, fabricated data and recycled text in 20 papers. Ozeki has had 19 papers retracted to date, 17 of which are described in the analysis. The latest report — an offshoot of one in 2018 that found he had committed misconduct in three papers — expands Ozeki’s liability to 22 articles.
A cognitive psychologist in Germany has lost one of two papers slated for retraction after her former institution found her guilty of misconduct.
In a 2019 report, Leiden University found that Lorenza Colzato, now of TU Dresden, had failed to obtain ethics ethics approval for some of her studies, manipulated her data and fabricated results in grant applications. Although the institution did not identify Colzato by name, Retraction Watch confirmed her identity.
A Nature journal has announced that it is conducting a “priority” investigation into a new paper claiming that women in science fare better with male rather than female mentors.
Science has retracted a 13-year-old paper, five years after data sleuth Elisabeth Bik first raised questions about issues with the images in the article.
The paper, “Secondary siRNAs result from unprimed RNA synthesis and form a distinct class,” appeared in 2007 and was written by a group of researchers in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The senior author of the study was Ronald Plasterk, founder of Frame Cancer Therapeutics in Amsterdam and once a minister in the Dutch government. The article has been cited at least 300 times, according to Clarivate Analytics Web of Science.
It also drew Bik’s attention. In 2015, she posted — as Peer 1 — on PubPeer about her concerns with one of the figures in the paper. Other commenters joined in, including to point out similarities between images in the Science paper and two other articles from members of the group.
Researchers who lost a paper derided by critics as anti-vaccine have republished their article in a different journal … owned by the same publisher (hint: rhymes with “smells of beer”).
As we reported in April 2019, the original article version of “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant only” appeared in November 2018 in Pharmacological Research.
Antivaccine advocates such as Celeste McGovern seized on the study, which also drew harsh criticism from Skeptical Raptor and Orac, who called it
An author tells us he is taking legal action against a journal and its publisher after the editor retracted one of his papers and flagged two others.
The Health Informatics Journal has issued expressions of concern for two articles on autism and retracted one on obesity in children. According to the journal, the papers — led by Fadi Thabtah, of the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand — were marred by compromised peer review.
But that’s not all. Apparently, well, things change.
A group of researchers at Aichi Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan, continues to lose papers for duplication of images and text from their previous work, and is now up to 19 retractions.
The co-authors of a paper that claimed jade amulets might prevent COVID-19 have tried to distance themselves from the work, in a letter to the co-editor of the journal that published it.
In fact, the first author, Moses Bility of the University of Pittsburgh, says of his co-authors: