The week at Retraction Watch featured the unmasking of the people behind PubPeer, and an editor doing the right thing following a high-profile retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A nearly ten-year-long series of investigations into a pair of plant physiologists who received millions in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation has resulted in debarments of less than two years for each of the researchers. The NSF Office of Inspector General recently posted its close-out report on its decision and a review of … Continue reading NSF investigation of high-profile plant retractions ends in two debarments
A paper on “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” whose puzzling publication (and retraction) history formed the basis of a series of Retraction Watch posts in 2013 and 2014 is back, as part of a new article in a different journal. Retraction Watch readers may recall a paper published in 2013 in Frontiers … Continue reading Recursive recursiveness: Retracted Lewandowsky et al conspiracy ideation study republished
The big news this week at Retraction Watch was the release of more than two dozen retractions for accounting researcher James Hunton, and the sentencing of Dong-Pyou Han for scientific fraud (see more below). Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
This week at Retraction Watch saw us report on thousands of retractions from IEEE, which will have a serious effect on retraction record-keeping, a bizarre case of author impersonation, and a look at dentistry in outer space. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
This week saw us profiled in The New York Times and de Volkskrant, and the introduction of our new staff writer. We also launched The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Three biologists at Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan have retracted a 2014 Frontiers in Plant Science paper on abnormal root growth in Arabidopsis “in light of new experimental evidence” showing they fingered the wrong mutant gene. The journal editors are hailing the retraction as an “excellent example of self-correction of the scientific record.” The paper, “Mechanosensitive channel candidate … Continue reading “[T]hese things can happen in every lab:” Mutant plant paper uprooted after authors correct their own findings
This week at Retraction Watch was dominated by the Science same-sex marriage study, after we broke the news Wednesday morning that one of its authors had requested its retraction. (And crashed our servers in the process.) So the first section of this Weekend Reads will focus on pieces following up on that story: The New … Continue reading Weekend reads: Gay canvassing study redux; editors fired; how the world’s biggest faker was caught
The week at Retraction Watch featured a number of legal cases by scientists trying to suppress criticism about their work. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Frontiers in Pharmacology has retracted a paper on baicalin, an antioxidant sold in health food stores, because it had both “incorrect data and invalid statistical analyses.” A comment on PubPeer notes that one of the figures (see image to the right) contains two similar-looking flow cytometry images labeled with different values, which could be what the … Continue reading “Incorrect data” kills apoptosis paper