A group of nanotechnology researchers in Iran is up to nine retractions after losing four papers in a go for problematic figures. The work was led by Abolfazl Akbarzadeh, a medicinal chemist at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, who has spent time as a visiting professor at Boston University and UCLA. Commenters on PubPeer including … Continue reading Nanotech group up to nine retractions
Two and a half years after critics raised concerns, a dermatology journal says it has called on two French institutions to launch an inquiry into a 2017 paper. The Journal of Investigative Dermatology has issued an expression of concern for the article, “NADPH Oxidase-1 Plays a Key Role in Keratinocyte Responses to UV Radiation and … Continue reading Dermatology journal calls for investigation into Bordeaux-INSERM work
The tip came from the leadership of another scientific conference. Did the Association for Computing Machinery know that they had published the proceedings of a conference with essentially the same name as that organization, IEEE, on the same dates, in the same venue, and with lots of overlapping authors? The two versions of the meeting … Continue reading More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings
Dear Retraction Watch reader: You may have noticed an increasing number of posts over the past few years that contain the phrase “obtained through a public records request.” Some examples: It’s how we learned that a pharmacology researcher was demoted after a misconduct investigation – and then became chair at another school. That story led … Continue reading What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.
It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year: Figure 5: There is an overlap between two … Continue reading Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction
If the writers of “Welcome Back, Kotter” wanted to issue a retraction statement, it might look something like this one from Mary Ann Liebert. We’ll call this one a hat tip to Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, a Sweathog whose permission slips “from his mother” became a meme. The paper in question appeared … Continue reading Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Cancer researcher faked data for 24 images in work funded by nine NIH grants: Federal watchdog The author of a retracted paper learns to be careful what he wishes for Journals acknowledge that a … Continue reading Weekend reads: Should open access advocates vilify publishers?; authorship for sale, $5,000; is economics just ‘bafflegab?’
A researcher at the center of questions about a biotech’s controversial experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease has lost five papers in PLOS One. The journal says it is retracting the articles, by Hoau-Yan Wang and colleagues, over concerns about the integrity of the data and the images in the papers. Wang does not agree with … Continue reading Five studies linked to Cassava Sciences retracted
When Marianne Alunno-Bruscia, the research integrity officer at France’s national oceanographic science institute, uncovered nearly a dozen papers with fraudulent authorship, she thought she’d stumbled on something bizarre. She didn’t know how right she was. As we reported in early February, the problems arose during an audit the research activities of the L’Institut Français de … Continue reading Will the real Tim Chen please stand up? A trip down the rabbit hole of deceit
A group of researchers at the University of Chicago has asked a Nature journal to retract a paper after PubPeer commenters pointed out numerous duplicated images in the article. The paper, “Synergistic checkpoint-blockade and radiotherapy–radiodynamic therapy via an immunomodulatory nanoscale metal–organic framework,” was published last month in Nature Biomedical Engineering. According to its senior author, … Continue reading Authors request retraction of study in Nature journal and look into four more papers