Deputy director of U.S. gov’t watchdog leaves to run another gov’t office

The second-in-command at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which oversees investigations into scientific misconduct, will be leaving the agency.

Scott Moore has been at ORI since 2016. He had previously been at the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General, where he was an investigative scientist for 13 years. He was appointed by former director Kathy Partin, who after a tumultuous two years left the ORI in November 2017, and is now the intramural research integrity officer at NIH.

Moore was named acting deputy director of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health’s (OASH) Office of Grants Management in July, serving in both that role and as ORI deputy director since then. According to a memo from Assistant Secretary for Health Brett P. Giroir that was circulated at that time: Continue reading Deputy director of U.S. gov’t watchdog leaves to run another gov’t office

Carlo Croce loses a round in legal bid to be reinstated as dep’t chair

Carlo Croce

Carlo Croce, a professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus who has faced multiple investigations into misconduct allegations, has been denied a temporary restraining order that he sought in order to be reinstated as chair of his department.

Croce was forced to step down from the post last year. Magistrate Jennifer D. Hunt, of the Franklin County civil court, wrote in a January 23 decision that

third parties and the public interest will be harmed if a temporary restraining order is granted and Dr. Croce is reinstated as Chair.

Croce, OSU said Continue reading Carlo Croce loses a round in legal bid to be reinstated as dep’t chair

Weekend reads: New revelations about CRISPR’d babies experiment; Impact Factor developer warns against using single metrics; is peer review just a game?

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 eight retractions at once for a biochemist in Spain; a researcher who lost her medical license for her misconduct; and news of an upcoming retraction in a food journal. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: New revelations about CRISPR’d babies experiment; Impact Factor developer warns against using single metrics; is peer review just a game?

Food packaging journal to retract paper by researchers in Thailand

A food packaging journal plans to retract a 2018 article by Thai researchers who tried to repackage (ahem) a virtually identical article of theirs, Retraction Watch has learned.

That’s not particularly unusual; duplication, sometimes inaccurately called “self-plagiarism,” happens, as they say. What makes the case more interesting is the back-and-forth between the journal and the authors.   

Early last December, the editor of the Food Packaging & Shelf Life, Ali Abas Wani, sent a letter to Chiravoot Pechyen, of Thammasat University, the senior author on a paper FPSL had recently published online (but not yet in print): Continue reading Food packaging journal to retract paper by researchers in Thailand

Total recall: Brazilian journal issues “total retraction” of plagiarized paper

We’ve seen partial retractions, and retract-and-replacements, but here’s a first (cue timpanis): The Total Retraction.

A Brazilian journal has pulled a 2018 paper on food security for plagiarism — at least, that’s what really happened; the stated reasons are a bit sauced up.

According to the notice: Continue reading Total recall: Brazilian journal issues “total retraction” of plagiarized paper

Can a “nudge” stop researchers from using the wrong cell lines?

Anita Bandrowski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, works on tools to improve the transparency and reproducibility of scientific methods. (Her work on Research Resource Identifiers, or RRIDs, has been previously featured on Retraction Watch.) This week, Bandrowski and colleagues  — including Amanda Capes-Davis, who chairs the International Cell Line Authentication Committee — published a paper in eLife that seeks to determine whether these tools are actually influencing the behavior of scientists, in this case by reducing the number of potentially erroneous cell lines used in published studies.

Such issues may affect thousands of papers. Among more than 300,000 cell line names in more than 150,000 articles, Bandrowski and her colleagues “estimate that 8.6% of these cell lines were on the list of problematic cell lines, whereas only 3.3% of the cell lines in the 634 papers that included RRIDs were on the problematic list,” suggesting “that the use of RRIDs is associated with a lower reported use of problematic cell lines.” 

Retraction Watch spoke with Bandrowski about the role of these tools in the larger movement to improve transparency and reproducibility in science, and whether meta-scientific text-mining approaches will gain traction in the research community.

Retraction Watch (RW): Your study presents RRID as a behavioral “nudge,” beyond its primary goal of standardizing method reporting. What other nudges can you envision to prevent misuse of cell lines in scientific research? Continue reading Can a “nudge” stop researchers from using the wrong cell lines?

Researcher banned from federal Canadian funding after misconduct loses medical license

via WCH

A once-prominent bone researcher whose career crumbled after allegations of misconduct has lost her medical license in Canada.  

The researcher, Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, formerly of the University of Toronto, had been considered a rising star in the international community of osteoporosis researchers, winning awards and collaborating with some of the leading senior investigators in the field.

But on March 6, 2018, Jamal was summoned by a disciplinary committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to hear the following letter: Continue reading Researcher banned from federal Canadian funding after misconduct loses medical license

Biochemist in Spain retracts eight papers at once

Carlos López-Otín

A high-profile researcher at the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain has retracted eight papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry for figure issues.

All of the papers were co-authored by Carlos López-Otín, who studies a group of enzymes that break down proteins, cancer genomics and aging, and whose lab web site boasts that

His works have been collected in more than 400 articles in international journals and have been cited to date more than 44.000 times, with an aggregate Hirsch index of h=100.

A representative notice: Continue reading Biochemist in Spain retracts eight papers at once

Weekend reads: Sokal on Sokal Squared hoax; is open access enough?; replication in the humanities

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 a showdown over a paper on abortion laws that left no one happy; the retraction of a highly cited paper for “overlap;” and three retractions for researchers whose university stopped responding to a publisher. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Sokal on Sokal Squared hoax; is open access enough?; replication in the humanities

After university goes silent, diabetes journal retracts three papers

A group of researchers based in Italy has had three papers retracted for likely using the same images to represent different experimental conditions.

The retractions, in Diabetes, published by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), follow expressions of concern for the papers in early 2018 and the launch of an investigation by the authors’ institution into the work. The status of that investigation by Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, however, is unclear, as the university has stopped responding to the journal’s inquiries.

Here are the three now-retracted papers: Continue reading After university goes silent, diabetes journal retracts three papers