Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa — known for his tough questions for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — wants to know why a former researcher at Iowa State University wasn’t prosecuted more vigorously after he was found to have deliberately spiked rabbit blood samples in a federally-funded HIV vaccine study. As Tony Leys of … Continue reading Should scientific fraud be treated as a crime?
The Journal of Food Science has retracted a 2012 paper by Chinese scientists, one of whom copped to having made up data in the paper — which also plagiarized from a 2009 article by other researchers — and forging his co-authors’ names on the manuscript. The article, “A Multiplex PCR Assay for the Rapid and … Continue reading 2 for 2: Fraud, plagiarism force retraction of Staph aureus paper
Here’s some of what crossed our desks this week: Dong Pyou Han, the former Iowa State University researcher who admitted faking the results of an HIV vaccine experiment, called himself a “foolish coward,” The Des Moines Register reported based on documents obtained from the university. Reporter Tony Leys also explored whether Han should be criminally … Continue reading Weekend reads: Fraudster calls himself a “foolish coward,” and COPE’s top cases
As a reporter on the police beat many years ago, one of us (Adam) used to hang out with a press officer whose desk at the station had the following sign: “Uma boca fechado não recolhe nenhum pé.” At least, that’s what it would have been had we been in Rio. In Palmer Park, Maryland, … Continue reading Researcher who called plagiarism “the worst type of fraud” retracts paper for…plagiarism
We have a second retraction from a group of neuroscience researchers in Belgium who discovered fatal errors in their work on how the brain sets about the task of reading written language. Spoiler alert: Turns out those errors weren’t errors after all. As we reported back in May, the group, from the University of Leuven, … Continue reading Fraud topples second neuroscience word processing paper
A bumper crop of material about misconduct, peer review, and related issues came to our attention this week, so without further ado:
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, beginning with a story we broke about faked HIV vaccine results that was picked up by the Des Moines Register and other outlets. Here’s what was happening elsewhere on the web:
It’s really hard to get papers retracted, police might be best-equipped to handle scientific misconduct investigations, and there’s finally software that will identify likely image manipulation. Those are three highlights from a number of pieces that have appeared in Nature and Nature Medicine in the past few weeks. Not surprisingly, there are common threads, so … Continue reading Should scientific misconduct be handled by the police? It’s fraud week at Nature and Nature Medicine
The University of Queensland has decided to get out in front of a serious research misconduct scandal by issuing a press release about the item even before, well, we could get a hold of the story. The affair involves Bruce Murdoch (all of his links at UQ are defunct), an expert in movement disorders such … Continue reading Aussie university asks for retraction, investigates former neurology researcher for fraud
A researcher at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands has been fired for research fraud, and the university is retracting two papers, the Dutch press is reporting. But don’t ask us who the employee was. That information is conspicuously absent from the medical center’s communications on the subject. Here’s a press release from Leiden, … Continue reading Leiden University fires employee for research fraud, two retractions to follow