“The retraction that took years” is a common enough refrain on Retraction Watch that it might as be its own genre. Here’s one that didn’t. A journal wasted no time pouncing on a suspect paper, retracting the 2016 article just three days after a commenter flagged concerns about the images in the work on PubPeer. … Continue reading Often, retractions take years. This one took three days.
Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sleuths began identifying them a few years ago. But there may be a new way: Earlier this month, Adam Day, a data scientist at SAGE Publishing, posted … Continue reading How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments
The head of a Japanese university has been found guilty of research misconduct for self-plagiarism – technically, duplication – and has agreed to pay a one-time cash penalty for his transgressions. According to the University of Aizu, a computer science and engineering school in Aizuwakamatsu, Toshiaki Miyazaki, the president and CEO, failed to appropriately cite … Continue reading University president in Japan self-plagiarized and will forfeit some pay
In September 2018, I wrote to the managing editor of FEBS Letters with my concerns about the extensive textual overlap between a 2011 article by Sonia A. Melo and Manel Esteller and other articles, including some that were not cited, such as a 2009 article in the Annual Review of Pathology by Yong Sun Lee … Continue reading ‘[T]he authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but…retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors’
The editor of a Science family journal waited three years before beginning the process of retracting a paper after learning that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had found duplication and mislabeling but no misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned. As we reported last November, the paper, “The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL mediates nuclear translocation of … Continue reading ‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation
The ‘publish or perish’ culture is no longer reserved for academic faculty and post-doctoral fellows. The paradigm has spilled over (or bled into) medical training, aided by the digital revolution. The widespread availability of online library catalogs and referencing software has enabled the mass production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. In short, medical research no … Continue reading Should residents and fellows be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses?
Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style. Last May, the journal Cureus published a paper titled “Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia Due to Homozygous Loss of the CD4 Start Codon.” The paper caught the notice of Andrea … Continue reading ‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted
In September 2015, after a lengthy investigation, the Committee on Scientific Integrity (CSI) of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) advised the LUMC Board of Directors to ask for retraction of two publications because of major data manipulation in images. The case involved Maria Fousteri, who by then had left LUMC. In the Netherlands it … Continue reading ‘Why did this take over five years?’ Reflecting on two new retractions
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year. We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American … Continue reading IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries
The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work. The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming … Continue reading Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report