Researchers pull Nature paper over first author’s objections

Researchers have retracted a 2015 Nature paper about the molecular underpinnings of immune function after discovering they could not replicate key parts of the results.

The first author, Wendy Huang — who started working as an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, only months after the paper appeared — did not sign the retraction letter, published last week. The research was conducted while Huang was working as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, home of last author Dan Littman (also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

What happened appears to be a case of “he said, she said:” Littman asked to retract the paper after his lab couldn’t reproduce it, and Huang insists the data remain correct, saying the process had been “unfair and done without due process:”

Continue reading Researchers pull Nature paper over first author’s objections

Weekend reads: “Ethics dumping;” getting scientists to admit mistakes; the problem with conference dinner chatter

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 collection of reports of scientific misconduct investigations, the story of a researcher who thought his work was important enough to be published three times, and a look at what happened when Elsevier tried open peer review. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: “Ethics dumping;” getting scientists to admit mistakes; the problem with conference dinner chatter

“The final verdict:” Lancet retracts two papers by Macchiarini

Paolo Macchiarini

The Lancet chapter of the Paolo Macchiarini saga appears to finally be over.

In an editorial titled “The final verdict on Paolo Macchiarini: guilty of misconduct,” the editors of the journal announce that they are retracting two papers by the now-disgraced surgeon and colleagues “after receiving requests to do so from the new President of the Karolinska Institute (KI), Ole Petter Ottersen.” Late last month, Ottersen declared Macchiarini and six other researchers — including one of the whistleblowers in the case — guilty of misconduct.

The long story took many twists and turns — for instance, in September 2015, Lancet editors wrote an editorial with close to the opposite title: “Paolo Macchiarini is not guilty of scientific misconduct,” published after KI released the results of a previous investigation:   Continue reading “The final verdict:” Lancet retracts two papers by Macchiarini

An author says his work should be “widely heralded and promoted.” So he published it 3 times.

Barislav Momčilović thinks that iodine status is — after iron deficiency — the “main public health” issue in the world today. So when he figured out what he believed was the best way to test levels of the mineral, he was determined to get the message out.

A little too determined, perhaps: He published the same information three times. And one journal caught on.  Last week, Thyroid retracted “Hair Iodine for Human Iodine Status Assessment,” a 2014 paper that they say overlapped with two earlier works.

While publishing duplicate work is considered by some to be just a violation of restrictive publisher copyright agreements, the presence of such duplicates in the literature can bias systematic reviews and other attempts to describe the state of the evidence in a given field. In a retraction notice, Thyroid noted that this was a case of Continue reading An author says his work should be “widely heralded and promoted.” So he published it 3 times.

After probe, journal removes flag from four papers, corrects manipulated images

Last year, Journal of Cell Science added notices to four papers after a reader contacted the editors with some concerns about issues with the figures. Now, it’s replacing the previous editorial notices with corrections, which address duplicated images and data.

When the journal issued expressions of concern for four papers co-authored by José Ignacio Rodriguez-Crespo about the allegations (which had also been raised on PubPeer), it notified his institution, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). The newly issued correction notices explain that UCM investigated the four papers, and the data support the results and conclusions. In two cases, the authors supplied the original data, and in the others, they replicated the experiments.

Rodriguez-Crespo declined to comment, saying only that the journal

Continue reading After probe, journal removes flag from four papers, corrects manipulated images

A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.

Jodi S. Cohen

Here’s a story that shows the lengths a public university — The University of Illinois at Chicago — went to block the release of information about a child psychiatry trial gone wrong, and how a reporter — Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica — fought them effectively at every turn to reveal the truth.

Earlier this year, ProPublica “revealed that the National Institute of Mental Health ordered the university to repay $3.1 million in grant money it had received to fund [Mani] Pavuluri’s study.” This kind of clawback is very, very rare.

We tipped our hats to Cohen then, because we had been trying for years to obtain documents that would tell the full story of the Pavuluri case, which we had been covering since 2015 when a retraction appeared. In particular, we’ve been trying to get the university to release their report of the investigation into Pavuluri’s work. We have been making a push for such reports, as we noted earlier this week in a roundup of more than 16 of them. Continue reading A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.

What happened when Elsevier tried open peer review? And which field says “no, thanks?”

Bahar Mehmani

Is open peer review the future? The EMBO Journal has offered it since 2009. eLife offers it. They’re not alone, although they’re still in the minority (a fact Irene Hames wishes would change). Elsevier, one of the world’s largest publishers, has tried a pilot of it, too, so we thought it would be worth finding out what happened. We spoke to Bahar Mehmani, Elsevier’s lead for reviewer experience, about the project, and lessons learned.

Retraction Watch (RW): Why did Elsevier decide to launch a pilot of open peer review, and why with these five journals? Continue reading What happened when Elsevier tried open peer review? And which field says “no, thanks?”

Reports of misconduct investigations can tell us a lot. Here are more than a dozen of them.

the waving cat, via Flickr

Fakery. Ignored whistleblowers. Sabotage. Subterfuge.

Reading reports of institutional investigations into allegations of misconduct can sometimes feel like reading a spy novel about science. And we’ve read a lot of them.

In a recent post that drew from one such report, we wrote:

Whenever we learn about misconduct cases at public universities, we file such public records requests to obtain more information because we believe, as did Justice Louis Brandeis, that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But just as retraction notices are often unhelpful and even misleading, suggesting a lack of transparency, reports of institutional investigations can leave a lot to be desired, and reveal flaws in the the process that lead to them. As we and C.K. Gunsalus noted recently in JAMA:

Continue reading Reports of misconduct investigations can tell us a lot. Here are more than a dozen of them.

Weekend reads: The fall of a Crossfit science watchdog; a CDC retraction about suicides; “superb subterfuge” by predatory journals

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 critic with more than two dozen retractions; why twenty journals were punished; and why 35,000 papers may be eligible for retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: The fall of a Crossfit science watchdog; a CDC retraction about suicides; “superb subterfuge” by predatory journals

35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring, says new paper

Elisabeth Bik

Yes, you read that headline right.

In a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington (also on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization), Roger Davis of the University of Massachusetts (and former MCB editor), and Amy Kullas, ASM’s publication ethics manager — found 59 potentially problematic papers, of which five were retracted. Extrapolating from these findings and those of another paper that scanned duplication rates, the researchers propose that tens of thousands of papers might need to be purged from the literature. That 35,000 figure is double the amount of retractions we’ve tallied so far in our database, which goes back to the 1970s. We spoke with the authors about their findings — and how to prevent bad images from getting published in the first place.

Retraction Watch: You found 59 potential instances of inappropriate duplication — how did you define this, and validate that the images were problematic?

Continue reading 35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring, says new paper