In our coverage Tuesday of the republication of the controversial retracted study of GMOs and rats by Gilles Seralini and colleagues, we wrote this about a strange passage in an editor’s note on the paper: The republished study was peer-reviewed, according to the press materials, and Seralini confirmed that it was in an email to … Continue reading Republished Seralini GMO-rat study was not peer-reviewed, says editor
Pro tip: If you’re going to write about stalking, it’s probably best if you don’t get too close to your material. That’s a lesson a group of researchers in Italy was forced to learn the hard way. They lost their 2013 article in Medicine, Science and the Law for being too similar to a 2008 … Continue reading Don’t walk this way: Stalking paper halted for plagiarism
The journal Blood has retracted a 2010 paper over the objections of most of its authors, two of whom were found by their university to have used “fraudulent methods” to obtain the data. We first reported on the case of Gerold Feuer last fall. The State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical Center in … Continue reading Journal retracts stem cell study despite objections of most authors
One of the complaints we often hear about the self-correcting nature of science is that authors and editors seem very reluctant to retract papers with obvious fatal flaws. Indeed, it seems fairly clear that the number of papers retracted is smaller than the number of those that should be. To try to get a sense … Continue reading “Barriers to retraction may impede correction of the literature:” New study
Oncology Reviews has retracted a 2014 paper on breast cancer after learning that the authors lifted parts of it from a continuing medical education lesson on Medscape. The paper, “Challenges of combined everolimus/endocrine therapy in hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer,” was written by Yousif Abubakr, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and Yasar Albushra, of … Continue reading Authors plagiarize CME cancer article, lose their review paper
A group at the University of Texas Southwestern led by Adi F. Gazdar that found evidence of inappropriate image manipulation in a number of their papers has retracted its seventh and eighth studies. Here’s the notice for 2005’s “Aberrant methylation profile of human malignant mesotheliomas and its relationship to SV40 infection,” in Oncogene:
The following post was written by a former research fellow in the lab of Piero Anversa to whom we’ve promised confidentiality. Anversa has previously told us that he cannot comment because of an ongoing investigation. Regular readers of Retraction Watch will note the recent news regarding the work conducted in the laboratory of Piero Anversa … Continue reading Braggadacio, information control, and fear: Life inside a Brigham stem cell lab under investigation
A former Harvard postdoc who was found guilty of faking data at Oxford as a student did the same thing at Harvard, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). We first wrote about Helen Freeman in February, when we covered a retraction in Cell Metabolism that said the UK’s Medical Research Council had found … Continue reading Serial fakery: Researcher found to have committed misconduct at Harvard and Oxford
The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology has retracted a 2013 paper by a group from China after learning that only the first author knew about the article. The paper was titled “Construction of circular miRNA sponges targeting miR-21 or miR-221 and demonstration of their excellent anticancer effects on malignant melanoma cells,” and it … Continue reading Forged authorship sinks melanoma paper
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, beginning with a story that stunned even us. There was lots happening elsewhere on the web, too, particularly among science journalists taking a look at their own work: