The Pennsylvania State University in May blocked a prominent professor at the school from doing research and making presentations on its behalf, Retraction Watch has learned.
An architecture journal’s “failure to act in a timely and proactive manner” in a case of plagiarism in a now-retracted review article has sparked the resignation of a member of its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.
“I am appalled that it took, essentially, from November 2022 until now, September 2024, to resolve what was a fairly straightforward matter,” Dirk H. R. Spennemann, of Charles Sturt University in Albury, Australia, wrote in a Sept. 18, 2024, email to the editor-in-chief of Buildings, an MDPI title.
But in June of that year, Marco Spada, a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Suffolk in the United Kingdom, informed Buildings the work borrowed heavily from two previous publications without proper citation. Although many sentences had been reworded using synonyms, the plagiarism was extensive and obvious.
Spada had recognized the article, a version of which he had previously reviewed – and rejected – as a referee for Sustainability, a different MDPI journal. Elements such as the title, the order in which the authors appeared and some of the abstract had changed, Spada told us. But it was still the same paper.
“Clearly they managed to outsmart the system,” Spada said.
The University of Iowa found a cardiology researcher violated multiple of its policies, including harassing his former mentees when they tried to leave his lab to establish labs of their own, according to an investigation report obtained by Retraction Watch.
The researcher, Kaikobad Irani, left the school last month with a six-figure settlement, and has a new job lined up, Retraction Watch has learned.
Irani studies the molecular mechanisms of the function and dysfunction of blood vessels. He’s listed as an inventor on four patents, including an active one regarding a compound that could lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
One of Irani’s active grants names the Providence VA Medical Center as the awardee organization. A spokesperson for the VA Providence Healthcare System confirmed Irani “is in the process of onboarding and is expected to begin working around November.”
A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections.
In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was given weekly progesterone injections to prevent preterm birth for her daughter, as reported by STAT. Six years later, after her daughter showed symptoms of an unknown hormonal condition which still hasn’t been formally diagnosed, Skopelitis discovered she should have received synthetic progesterone variant 17α-hydroxyprogesterone caproate, often referred to as 17-OHPC, 17P, sold as Makena. When the drug wasn’t available, her doctor had ordered the wrong replacement from a compounding pharmacy. Skopelitis suspects her daughter’s condition could be a result of the mixup.
The confusion lies within the literature, Skopelitis says: Many clinical trials and papers refer to 17P as intramuscular progesterone, as if they are interchangeable or even the same compound.
In 2021, the provost of the University of Maryland, Baltimore sounded the alarm about a troubling batch of papers from the lab of Richard Eckert, the former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the institution.
The provost sent letters to the editors of seven journals calling out a string of serious issues. Based on the university’s investigation, the papers contained duplicated, fabricated and falsified data, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.
But more than three years later, the results of those alerts are mixed: Of the 11 papers the university flagged in 2021, editors corrected three and retracted two. Six still await resolution, with no apparent action taken by the journals.
A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has retracted two more papers, bringing his total to 13.
Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori – who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard – brings the total to 13.
Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns.
An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure out the problem. A month later, when Aquarius, a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, revisited the paper, the figure had been replaced without any note that the publisher had fixed the issue.
Aquarius once again took to PubPeer to express his concerns. “I don’t see any notification when looking at the landing site for the paper: no erratum, corrigendum or a simple log-entry that something has been changed,” he wrote, noting that he had informed Elsevier, the journal’s publisher about the issue. In July, the journal issued a corrigendum for the paper.
“I was quite a bit upset about it,” Aquarius told Retraction Watch. “It takes away one of the key elements for any reader to be critical, namely that you know what has happened.”
A professor of biomedical engineering at the Pennsylvania State University today lost a government-funded study in Science Advances, marking her second retraction.
The researcher, Deborah Kelly, is also facing retraction of a paper in Current Opinion in Structural Biology after a review undertaken by her institution found “serious data integrity concerns” in the work, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch. Kelly has hired a lawyer to fight the retraction, apparently without success. (Update on Sept. 12: The paper has now been retracted.)
A former research fellow at Harvard Medical School faked data and used images from another scientist without attribution in a published paper and two grant applications, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
The paper was retracted in March. The retraction note cited an investigation by City of Hope and detailed “discrepancies in the data” that match ORI’s findings.
