As a first-year medical student at the University of California, San Diego, Jessica Tang already has an impressive CV. Her name has appeared on ten papers in the medical literature, including three in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. On one of these she was the sole author. Except that one doesn’t exist anymore. But the … Continue reading Med student loses paper when former boss claims right to data
The authors of a study published last year looking at the effects of cell phone exposure on mice in utero have corrected a figure after it was questioned. New experiments, they write, confirm the original conclusions they drew from the figure. Here’s the corrected figure from the paper in Scientific Reports, published by Nature Publishing … Continue reading Paper linking cell phones during pregnancy to behavior problems in mice corrected
The journal Oncogene has retracted a 2005 paper from a group led by Jose Roman-Gomez, a Spanish researcher who appears to be a serial image manipulator/misappropriator. The article, “Promoter hypomethylation of the LINE-1 retrotransposable elements activates sense/antisense transcription and marks the progression of chronic myeloid leukemia,” was published online in September 2005 and has been … Continue reading Lifted figure prompts retraction of Oncogene paper by Roman-Gomez
If you went looking for ten of our posts about Anil Potti today, you would have seen error messages instead. That’s because someone claiming to be from a news site in India alleged we violated their copyright with those ten posts about the former Duke University cancer researcher who has had 19 papers retracted, corrected, … Continue reading WordPress removes Anil Potti posts from Retraction Watch in error after false DMCA copyright claim
The FASEB Journal has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), looking at the role of a tumor-suppressing micro-RNA in pulmonary fibrosis. The retraction suggests the provenance of the data are in question, and we learned details of what went wrong. Here’s the notice, which, sadly, is behind … Continue reading Author retracts FASEB Journal paper for data reuse
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned Bryan William Doreian, a former postdoc in dermatology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, for falsifying data in his dissertation and a 2009 paper in Molecular Biology of the Cell (for which it provided a cover image, at right). ORI says Doreian’s bad NIH-funded data also appeared … Continue reading ORI says Case Western skin scientist falsified data
Last year, an audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found “a potential for unnecessary duplication” among the billions of dollars in research grants funded by national agencies. Some researchers, it seemed, could be winning more than one grant to do the same research. Prompted by that report, Virginia Tech’s Skip Garner and his colleagues … Continue reading Has “double-dipping” cost U.S. science funding agencies tens of millions of dollars?
A new study in Clinical Chemistry paints an alarming picture of how often scientists deposit data that they’re supposed to — but perhaps not surprisingly, papers whose authors did submit such data scored higher on a quality scale than those whose authors didn’t deposit their data. Ken Witwer, a pathobiologist at Hopkins, was concerned that … Continue reading Study finds many authors aren’t sharing data when they publish — and leads to a PLOS ONE retraction
An endocrinologist who resigned from the University of Tokyo last March as the university was investigating his work has retracted another paper. Here’s the notice for the paper by corresponding author Shigeaki Kato and colleagues in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research:
Partial retractions — as opposed corrections or the full monty — are unusual events in scientific publishing. But they appear to come in twos. The journal Infection and Immunity, the work of whose editor, Ferric Fang, is much admired by this blog, has a fascinating example of the breed in its February issue. The article … Continue reading Plague paper partially retracted