Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: 100 fake professors; study on police killings retracted; false data won’t scuttle company buyout

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The top retractions of 2019;
Two retractions and three corrections by an award-winning researcher;
The retraction of a neuroscience paper from Science.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Duke misconduct case prompts another expression of concern — but not a retraction

Here’s an expression of concern that raised some eyebrows around the Retraction Watch HQ.

Neuroscience group retracts Science paper

A group of neuroscientists in Switzerland have retracted a 2019 paper in Science whose first author they say falsified data in the study.

The article, “Insular cortex processes aversive somatosensory information and is crucial for threat learning,” came from the lab of Ralf Schneggenburger, of the Ecole Polytechniqe Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). The first author was Emmanuelle Berret, then a post-doc in the lab.

EPFL issued a press release about the study when it appeared. According to the release, the research showed that the insular cortex — a region “deep within the lateral sulcus” — is in charge of processing how mice and humans (pace, James Heathers) apparently learn from painful stimuli:

The top retractions of 2019: A new record, some impressive numbers, and some bizarre stories

Not surprisingly, the year that saw our database surpass 20,000 retractions was a busy one for us. In what has become an annual tradition, our friends at The Scientist asked us to round up what we thought were the biggest retractions of the last 12 months.

Embattled cancer researcher loses legal bid to be reinstated as department chair at OSU

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has waged legal battles against those he feels have wronged him, has lost another of those fights.

A judge in Franklin County, Ohio, ruled against Croce in a case he brought against OSU to stop them from removing him as chair of his department. Croce had filed the suit late last year. Details are scant, but an order to terminate the case appeared in court records earlier this week.

An OSU spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

“Commendable”: Researchers retract a paper when they find gene sequence errors

Researchers in Italy have retracted a 2019 paper on the genetics of a form of herpes virus after determining that the genomic sequences they thought they’d been analyzing proved to be something else.

The paper, “A complex evolutionary relationship between HHV-6A and HHV-6B,” appeared in July in Virus Evolution, an Oxford University Press title. The authors came from the Scientific Institute IRCCS in Lecco, and the University of Milan.

The article purported to find that:

Award-winning researcher in India retracts two papers, corrects three

Kithiganahalli Narayanaswamy Balaji, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has retracted two papers and corrected three for duplication of images.

Balaji, who won the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize from India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) “for outstanding contributions to science and technology,” is last author of the five papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) from 2008 to 2015.

The authors take responsibility for what they call “inadvertent mistakes.” The retraction notice for “Pathogen-specific TLR2 protein activation programs macrophages to induce Wnt-β-catenin signaling,” for example, concludes as follows:

Weekend reads: Stolen identity and peer review; key heart data concealed; psychology’s ‘collective self-deception’

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The retraction of a paper claiming a link between the HPV vaccine and lower pregnancy rates;
Whistleblowers in a recent case speaking out;
Two expressions of concern for a Cambridge researcher;
The retraction of a paper on creativity for duplication.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

‘The policy of Creativity Research Journal is to consider only original material.’ Prominent Cornell professor has another paper retracted for duplication.

Robert Sternberg, a Cornell psychology professor whose work has earned three retractions for duplication, has had another paper retracted for the same reason.

Here’s the notice:

‘A long and lonely process:’ Whistleblowers in a misconduct case speak out

Last week, we reported on a case at the University of Leiden in which the institution found that a former psychology researcher there had committed research misconduct. In the anonymized report — which we were able to confirm regarded Lorenza Colzato, who is listed as a faculty member at Ruhr University in Bochum and at TU Dresden — the university found a lack of ethics approval for some studies and fabricating results in some grant applications. We asked the three whistleblowers in the case — Bryant Jongkees, Roberta Sellaro, and Laura Steenbergen — to reflect on their experiences. (We should note that they did not confirm it was Colzato named in the report.)

Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to come forward?

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