A Springer Nature journal has retracted four papers by a group of materials scientists in France, Spain and Tunisia, and slapped expressions of concern on four more.
All eight papers, from Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics, share three common authors: Abdelmajid Lassoued, Salah Ammar, and Abdellatif Gadri, of Université de Gabès in Tunisia. The retractions and expressions of concern all relate to duplicate publication of other work by papers that include various members of the team as authors.
A journal has retracted a 2015 paper because it apparently plagiarized a manuscript submitted two years earlier — but we’re scratching our heads about how it all happened.
A former veterinary scientist at the University of Maryland has been found guilty of misconduct, including fabrication of data, by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Yesterday, a Federal U.S. judge ruled against Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, in a case Croce had filed against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017. As Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, writes in the 36-page ruling — which we’d recommend reading in its entirety:
The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted.
Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found replication of the virus that causes Covid-19 in the dialysis fluid of a patient with kidney disease. Again, hasty publication appears to be involved. We’ve been tracking retractions of Covid-19 articles on our website, and, let’s just say, the list is almost certainly a trailing indicator of the robustness of the science here — as it is with retractions during any period.
Back to the letter. “COVID-19: Should sexual practices be discouraged during the pandemic?” was written by ZhiQiang Yin, of the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, in China. Yin submitted the article on April 14. The journal accepted it on the 16th and published it on April 30th.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells in DIC microscopy via Wikimedia
A team of researchers in France has lost two papers on their studies of yeast because the work was “a complete work of fiction,” in the words of one colleague.
The papers came from the lab of Jean-Luc Parrou, of the University of Toulouse, and involved work by a former PhD student of his named Marjorie Petitjean. According to Parrou, institutional investigators are now in the process of revoking her degree, but have been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. We could not find contact information for Petitjean.
One of the articles, “Yeast tolerance to various stresses relies on the trehalose-6P synthase (Tps1) protein, not on trehalose,” appeared last year in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It has been cited 54 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The other, “A new function for the yeast Trehalose-6P Synthase (Tps1) Protein, as key pro-survival factor during growth, chronological ageing, and apoptotic stress,” was published in Mechanisms of Ageing and Development in 2017. It has been cited 11 times.
A group of researchers in Scotland have taken aim at a study published in early March which reported surprising findings on the genetics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the story of what it took to correct the record about the paper is likely to be all too familiar to those who attempt such feats. It involved a blog post and a new paper — neither of which appeared on the site of the original journal that published the work, and neither of which is seeing the kind of attention paid to the original article.
The paper, “On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” appeared in National Science Review, published by Oxford Academic. According to the abstract:
