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:
Last November we wrote about the retraction of a 2010 paper in PNAS by Annemie Schuerwegh and colleagues. Schuerwegh had been fired from Leiden University in The Netherlands for fraud, which said there would be a second retraction coming. It has. The article, “Anti-citrullinated protein antibodies in rheumatoid arthritis: a functional role for mast cells … Continue reading Second paper falls for ex-Leiden researcher accused of fraud
One of the questions we often get — but are careful to answer with some version of “we don’t know because we don’t have a denominator” — is how retraction rates vary by scientific field and country. We’ve noticed that the reasons for retraction seem to vary among countries, but didn’t really have the data. … Continue reading Which countries have the most retractions, for which reasons?
The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has retracted a 2013 article by a group from Dubai and Italy after learning of serious issues with the data in the report. The article, “Transanal haemorrhoidal dearterialisation with mucopexy versus stapler haemorrhoidopexy: a randomised trial with long term follow-up,” purportedly described a long-term telephone … Continue reading Dubai-ous: Journal yanks surgery paper for consent, data issues
The University of Amsterdam has called for the retraction of a 2011 paper by two psychology researchers after a school investigation concluded that the article contained bogus data, the Dutch press are reporting. The paper, “Sense Creative! The Impact of Global and Local Vision, Hearing, Touching, Tasting and Smelling on Creative and Analytic Thought,” was … Continue reading New Dutch psychology scandal? Inquiry cites data manipulation, calls for retraction
A group of authors in China has retracted their December 2013 paper in PLoS ONE after realizing that they’d been studying the wrong cells. The paper, “Up-Regulation of pVHL along with Down-Regulation of HIF-1α by NDRG2 Expression Attenuates Proliferation and Invasion in Renal Cancer Cells,” came from Lei Gao, of the Fourth Military Medical University, … Continue reading Wrong cell line leads to retraction of kidney cancer study
We have some updates on the case of more than 120 fake SCIgen conference proceedings papers that slipped into IEEE and Springer journals.
Another very busy week at Retraction Watch. There were a lot of gems elsewhere. Here’s a sampling:
We’ve only covered one retraction from Nigeria. But as we’ve often noted, retraction rates don’t necessarily correlate with rates of problematic research, so the low number doesn’t really answer the question in this post’s title. Lucky for us, a group of authors have started publishing surveys of Nigerian scientists on the subject. In a new … Continue reading How common is scientific misconduct in Nigeria?
In 2011, a group of researchers at Columbia University reported in Cell that they had been able to convert skin cells from patients with Alzheimer’s disease into functioning neurons — a finding that raised the exciting prospect of “made to order” brain cells for patients with the degenerative disease. As one researcher not involved with … Continue reading Fraud fells Alzheimer’s “made to order” neurons paper in Cell