Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychology professor who retracted a paper last year following a university investigation, has resigned his post. As the Boston Globe’s Carolyn Johnson, who broke the original Hauser retraction story, reports:
Readers of this blog by now know that if there’s one thing that really gets us going, it’s obfuscation. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the following retraction notice from the journal Psychopharmacology, made us particularly batty: This paper has been retracted by the author because of legal issues. The notice refers to “Selective activation … Continue reading Cryptic “legal issues” lead to retraction of paper about potential Novartis alcohol abuse drug
In a quote that has become part of medical school orientations everywhere, David Sackett, often referred to as the “father of evidence-based medicine,” once famously said: Half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is … Continue reading So how often does medical consensus turn out to be wrong?
The journal International Immunology has retracted a 2007 article, “Amelioration of hepatic fibrosis via beta-glucosylceramide-mediated immune modulation is associated with altered CD8 and NKT lymphocyte distribution,” by a group of Israeli liver researchers whose manuscript included a composite image that didn’t quite call itself such. The study, by scientists at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, … Continue reading “Representative” image in liver paper leads to retraction
If you’ve been wondering what’s happening in the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia, the University of East London researcher who has been found guilty of faking data as a graduate student at Cambridge and of misconduct at University College London, so have we. We last reported, in February, that Imperial College London, where Ahluwalia earned his … Continue reading Imperial, where Jatinder Ahluwalia earned his PhD, has re-run experiments, and is now reviewing results
The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) has retracted four studies done in a Mount Sinai School of Medicine lab whose principal investigator died last month. The studies, by the late Maria Diverse-Pierluissi and colleagues, were as follows: N-type Ca2+ channels as scaffold proteins in the assembly of signaling molecules for GABA-B receptor effects (cited 9 … Continue reading Four mysterious retractions in the JBC for a group whose PI recently passed away
There’s a highly unusual situation brewing at the Archives of Internal Medicine. At 3:48 Eastern time on Monday, 12 minutes before the embargo lifted on the June 28 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, the following message went out from its press office: The editorial office of the Archives of Internal Medicine has made … Continue reading Unprecedented? Journal yanks transcendental meditation paper 12 minutes before it’s scheduled to publish
The other day we wrote about a case of plagiarism in an education journal serving the Whole Schooling community. One of the questions we always ask editors and writers victimized by plagiarists is how they learned about the theft. The answer typically involves some version of “we were reading a new paper and saw some … Continue reading That sounds familiar! Education paper plagiarism caught — inadvertently — by author
The International Journal of Whole Schooling has retracted a 2007 article for what it calls “substantial” plagiarism. The article, titled “The relations between parenting and adolescent motivation,” was written by Theiienhuong N. Hoang, an education researcher at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. The aim of the paper: Parenting practices that influence or teach adaptive … Continue reading Whole schooling paper retracted after discovering that it was largely lifted
Here’s a good way to increase the number of times your work is cited: Publish studies three times. On second (or third) thought, maybe not: The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry & Molecular Biology has retracted a pair of articles by three Japanese researchers who apparently liked their own work so much they decided to submit … Continue reading The new math: How to up your citations (hint: duplication). Plus a correction for Naoki Mori