New engineering dean has two retractions for authorship manipulation

A newly appointed dean at the University of Guelph in Canada has had two papers retracted for “evidence of authorship manipulation.”  Another article by the researcher, Moncef Nehdi, formerly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, seems to match a paper that had its authorship advertised for sale, according to a post on PubPeer.  Nehdi told … Continue reading New engineering dean has two retractions for authorship manipulation

Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold

Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles. Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications … Continue reading Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold

First paper retracted in string of studies using the wrong medication name

A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections.  In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager … Continue reading First paper retracted in string of studies using the wrong medication name

Exclusive: One university’s three-year battle to retract papers with fake data

In 2021, the provost of the University of Maryland, Baltimore sounded the alarm about a troubling batch of papers from the lab of Richard Eckert, the former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the institution.  The provost sent letters to the editors of seven journals calling out a string of serious … Continue reading Exclusive: One university’s three-year battle to retract papers with fake data

‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers

Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns.  An author of the  study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure … Continue reading ‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers

Penn State prof earns second retraction, faces third following university probe

A professor of biomedical engineering at the Pennsylvania State University today lost a government-funded study in Science Advances, marking her second retraction.  The researcher, Deborah Kelly, is also facing retraction of a paper in Current Opinion in Structural Biology after a review undertaken by her institution found “serious data integrity concerns” in the work, according … Continue reading Penn State prof earns second retraction, faces third following university probe

Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails

A researcher who posted on LinkedIn about a paper that plagiarized his work says he’s now the subject of an email campaign making false allegations about his articles. In July, we reported that Sasan Sadrizadeh, researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had his work plagiarized in a now-retracted paper.  “In what seems … Continue reading Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails

A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.

In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized.  The researcher pointed Pineda to a paper, “A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator,” which appeared in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical … Continue reading A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.

A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.

When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work. “It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young … Continue reading A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.

‘No animosity between us’: Lungless frog finding retracted after 16 years

In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper in Current Biology reporting on what they said was a lungless water-loving frog in Borneo.  According to David Bickford, then of the National University of Singapore, and his colleagues, the Bornean flat-headed frog “breathed” the way most salamanders do:  by absorbing oxygen through their skin or, … Continue reading ‘No animosity between us’: Lungless frog finding retracted after 16 years