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The Journal of Biological Chemistry has retracted three papers by a group from the University of California, Los Angeles, citing problems with the figures.
Two of the papers, published in 2002, 2004 and 2009, have the same last author, Mark H. Doolittle, who is the first author of the most recent article. Doolittle, who appears to be a highly talented woodworker, has left UCLA and did not respond to a request for comment.
The retraction notice for the 2002 paper, “Maturation of lipoprotein lipase in the endoplasmic reticulum: Concurrent formation of functional dimers and inactive aggregates,” states:
A cancer researcher in England says he will be retracting a 2011 paper after acknowledging “unacceptable” manipulation of some of the figures in the article.
Richard Hill, of the University of Portsmouth, this week agreed to retract the article, “DNA-PKcs binding to p53 on the p21WAF1/CIP1 promoter blocks transcription resulting in cell death,” which appeared in the journal Oncotarget.
The paper, which Hill wrote while he was at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had drawn scrutiny on PubPeer four years ago, with one poster noting “many indications of blot image manipulation” in the figures. Additional comments appeared earlier this month.
A researcher in India is up to five retractions, by our count, for problematic data and image issues.
The latest retractions involve articles published in 2008 and 2013 in the journal Life Sciences. The last author on the papers is Yogeshwer Shukla, of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, about whom we have previously written.
The first paper, “Resveratrol induces apoptosis involving mitochondrial pathways in mouse skin tumorigenesis,” is rife with image problems:
A former postdoc at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) made up data for 59 experiments that never happened, according to new findings by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
The ORI found that Rahul Agrawal “knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsified and/or fabricated:”
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a request: Our co-founder Ivan Oransky celebrated a birthday this past week, and he’d like nothing more than a gift to Retraction Watch to support our work. Here’s your chance.
The University of Kentucky has started termination proceedings against a pair of scientists found guilty of “significant departures from accepted practices of research,” according to the institution.
The scientists, Xianglin Shi, who up until now had held the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and served as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine, and Zhuo Zhang in the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology in the College of Medicine, have lost access to their laboratories, which are shuttered, and other university equipment, UK said in a statement. A third researcher, Donghern Kim, who worked under Zhang, already has been fired in the scandal.
In October, the university told us that it was aware of the retractions but “not able to provide more information at this time.” The ongoing investigation was first reported in April by the Lexington Herald-Leader.
According to the UK’s announcement today, the inquiry, which began in June 2018, into Shi, Zhang and Kim found that:
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A microbiology journal has issued an expression of concern over image reuse in a 2010 paper whose senior author has already racked up five retractions for duplicating figures.
By our count, Waris — whose work has made several appearances in PubPeer — has lost at least five papers to retraction for image duplication and questionable data.
A year ago today, Jennifer Powers, a co-author of a 2009 paper wrote to Springer Nature to alert the publisher to the fact that Tropical Dry Deciduous Forest: Research Trends and Emerging Features, a 2017 textbook by J. S. Singh and R.K. Chaturvedi, had plagiarized her work, and the work of others. A publisher representative responded six days later, saying they would look into the matter.
Then, for five months, crickets.
On January 23 of this year, Powers, of the University of Minnesota, sent another message asking for a progress report. Several days later, a Springer Nature staffer wrote to say they would provide an answer by mid-February.
Mid-February came and went, and the co-author sent another reminder, as did Jesse Lasky, of Penn State, another of the authors who said his work had been plagiarized. Back from Springer came this message:
