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.
Continue reading The top retractions of 2019: A new record, some impressive numbers, and some bizarre stories
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:
Continue reading Embattled cancer researcher loses legal bid to be reinstated as department chair at OSU
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:
Continue reading “Commendable”: Researchers retract a paper when they find gene sequence errors
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:
Continue reading Award-winning researcher in India retracts two papers, corrects three
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: Stolen identity and peer review; key heart data concealed; psychology’s ‘collective self-deception’
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:
Continue reading ‘The policy of Creativity Research Journal is to consider only original material.’ Prominent Cornell professor has another paper retracted for duplication.
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?
Continue reading ‘A long and lonely process:’ Whistleblowers in a misconduct case speak out
A paper on the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) that was called a “very flawed and biased study with the potential of being misinterpreted or misused” has been retracted.
Continue reading Journal retracts paper claiming a link between the HPV vaccine and lower pregnancy rates
A researcher at the University of Cambridge has had two papers subjected to expressions of concern by the editors of PLOS ONE for image problems.
The expressions of concern for “The Coordination of Cell Growth during Fission Yeast Mating Requires Ras1-GTP Hydrolysis” and “The Role of the RACK1 Ortholog Cpc2p in Modulating Pheromone-Induced Cell Cycle Arrest in Fission Yeast” are extensive. They both refer to multiple “discontinuities,” “similarities,” and other issues.
The common author on the two papers is Graham Ladds, who told Retraction Watch that no other papers would be affected. He said that
Continue reading ‘Exceptionally silly mistakes’: PLOS ONE flags two papers by Cambridge researcher for image issues
A group of researchers from Iran, Italy and the UK have retracted two meta-analyses on supplements and high blood pressure after making what a statistics expert calls a common error.
Both papers were originally published in the Journal of Human Hypertension. Here’s the retraction notice for “Elevated blood pressure reduction after α-lipoic acid supplementation: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials:”
Continue reading Authors retract two studies on high blood pressure and supplements after realizing they’d made a common error