Here’s a retraction from Stem Cells and Development that we’re just now getting around to covering. The paper, “Non-viral reprogramming of skeletal myoblasts with valproic acid for pluripotency,” appeared in June 2012 in a preliminary online form and was written by a group at the University of Cincinnati. As the retraction notice states:
PubMed today launches a pilot version of PubMed Commons, a system that enables researchers to share their opinions about scientific publications. Researchers can comment on any publication indexed by PubMed, and read the comments of others. In general, we’re big fans of post-publication peer review, as Retraction Watch readers know. Once it’s out of its … Continue reading PubMed now allows comments on abstracts — but only by a select few
A leading Neapolitan cancer researcher is under criminal investigation for fraud, the Italian press is reporting. Although we have only rough translations of the story, it seems the researcher, Alfredo Fusco, of the National Council of Research’s Institute of Experimental Endocrinology and Oncology, has been accused of manipulating images in published studies and to strengthen … Continue reading Italian cancer specialist facing criminal investigation for misconduct
Ariel Fernandez, an Argentine chemist (who claims to hold the fastest-awarded PhD from Yale) and the subject of institutional investigations at multiple universities, has corrected several papers recently. What makes the moves particularly unusual — and interesting — is the stated reason for the amendments: disclaiming any funding from the National Institutes of Health for … Continue reading Researcher who threatened Retraction Watch with lawsuit corrects funding source for several papers
Alan Sokal’s influence has certainly been felt strongly recently. Last month, a critique by Sokal — who in 1996 got a fake paper published in Social Text — and two colleagues forced a correction of a much-ballyhooed psychology paper. A few days after that, we reported on a Serbian Sokal hoax-like paper whose authors cited the scholarly … Continue reading Science reporter spoofs hundreds of open access journals with fake papers
Irony alert: If you’re going to publish a paper on purportedly new molecules, please try to make sure those substances are indeed novel. Here’s case were that wasn’t quite so. The Journal of Saudi Chemical Society has retracted a 2011 paper by a researcher who lifted the entire article from a previously published paper by … Continue reading Saudi journal retracts paper on new chemicals for being, well, not new
The press corps has turned its attention to scientific publishing in China this week. Here’s Naomi Ching’s lede — that’s how we spell it in journalism — from Nautilus: You may have heard that Chinese researchers are not very well compensated, compared to their Western counterparts. What you might not know is that they can … Continue reading Big trouble in little China: Two looks at what warps scientific publishing there
At team of researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center has retracted a paper after realizing that the cell lines they were using weren’t what they thought they were. Here’s the detailed notice:
What do porn star Ron Jeremy, Max Weber and Michael Jackson have in common? Very little — except the three names appear in the list of references for a recent hoax paper by a group of Serbian academics who, fed up with the poor state of their country’s research output, scammed a Romanian magazine by … Continue reading A Serbian Sokal? Authors spoof pub with Ron Jeremy and Michael Jackson references
Dong Hee Shin, who studies virtual reality and other technology and who has already retracted five papers, has had another retracted. Here’s the notice in the Journal of Media Economics: