Another busy week at Retraction Watch, with Ivan speaking in Vienna, at a PhD student retreat in nearby Zwettl, and in London. The retreat gave rise to “We Will Retract You,” which may just become the Retraction Watch theme song. Watch here. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Last November we wrote about the retraction of a 2010 paper in PNAS by Annemie Schuerwegh and colleagues. Schuerwegh had been fired from Leiden University in The Netherlands for fraud, which said there would be a second retraction coming. It has. The article, “Anti-citrullinated protein antibodies in rheumatoid arthritis: a functional role for mast cells … Continue reading Second paper falls for ex-Leiden researcher accused of fraud
In 2011, a group of researchers at Columbia University reported in Cell that they had been able to convert skin cells from patients with Alzheimer’s disease into functioning neurons — a finding that raised the exciting prospect of “made to order” brain cells for patients with the degenerative disease. As one researcher not involved with … Continue reading Fraud fells Alzheimer’s “made to order” neurons paper in Cell
Retraction Watch readers will likely be familiar with the story of Paul Brookes, the University of Rochester researcher whose identity as the person behind Science-Fraud.org was revealed in January 2013. That revelation — and legal threats — forced Brookes to shutter Science-Fraud.org. In a new illuminating interview in Science, Brookes discusses the legal threats he … Continue reading So what happened after Paul Brookes was forced to shut down Science-Fraud.org?
We have an update on the story of 120 bogus papers being removed by IEEE and Springer. The latter posted a statement earlier today, which we include in its entirety below:
Woo-Suk Hwang is having quite a comeback. The cloning researcher’s fall from grace in 2005 and 2006 was covered worldwide, featuring two high-profile retractions from Science and convictions (now under appeal) on charges he embezzled government funds and broke South Korea’s bioethics law. But as Nature reported last month in a profile focusing on Hwang’s … Continue reading Fraud, retractions no barrier to US cloning patent for Woo-Suk Hwang
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, featuring lots of snow at HQ and a trip to take part in a conference in Davis, California. Here’s what was happening elsewhere on the web:
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