As Jason Isbell sings, doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do. But sometimes it’s even harder than it needs to be. Ask Cory Xian. When Xian, a bone researcher at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide, and his colleagues found an error in their 2018 paper in the Journal of Bone … Continue reading Second time’s the charm: The author who requested a retraction twice
If you need a reminder of how slowly the wheels of justice grind, here’s one. Earlier this month, Sam W. Lee agreed to pay the U.S. government $215,000 to settle allegations that the former Harvard researcher had made false claims in a grant application. It turns out that at least one skeptical researcher had notified … Continue reading The decade-long saga capped by a $215,000 settlement with the US government
A journal has issued expressions of concern for three papers from 2014 and 2015 by a group at Stony Brook University in New York whose work has come under scrutiny on PubPeer for suspect images. The articles, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, were written by Adan Aguirre, a pharmacological scientist at Stony Brook, … Continue reading Neuroscientist’s work earns three expressions of concern
Should a journal retract a paper when they learn that one of its authors has earned a year-long prison sentence for downloading child pornography? For Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics the answer was no. And experts in publication ethics say that was the right call. The researcher in question is Jan Joosten, who … Continue reading Should journals retract when an author is sent to prison for a crime unrelated to their work?
Two journals have retracted three papers by a former researcher at the University of Colorado Denver six weeks after Retraction Watch first revealed that the university had recommended correcting the research record in 2016. Another journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper flagged in the investigation. Despite a recommendation that nine different … Continue reading Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch
Two years after being alerted to a questionable figure in a 2016 paper by a group with a questionable publication history, a PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern about the article. The paper, “Deprivation of L-Arginine Induces Oxidative Stress Mediated Apoptosis in Leishmania donovani Promastigotes: Contribution of the Polyamine Pathway,” was published in … Continue reading Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns
What do subterranean insect provinces and motion to clamor have to do with microprocessors and microsystems? That’s an excellent question. Read on, dear reader.
An investigation by the National Institutes of Health has led to the retraction of a 2016 paper in PLOS Biology for manipulation of the data in the article. But the journal has republished a revised version of the paper — minus the bad data — on which the researcher found to have committed the misconduct … Continue reading Researcher committed misconduct while at NIH, say institutes — but is allowed to publish a revised version of a paper
File this under “doing the right thing:” A group of stroke researchers in Germany have retracted a paper they published earlier this year after finding an error in their work shortly after publication that doomed the findings. Julian Klingbeil, of the Department of Neurology at the University of Leipzig Medical Center, and his colleagues had … Continue reading ‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke
A European cardiology journal has issued expressions of concern for seven widely-cited papers dating back to 2009 after a reader flagged suspicious images in the articles. Although the cast of characters changes, the senior author on all seven papers is Chao-Ke Tang, of the First Affiliated Hospital of the University of South China, in Hengyang, … Continue reading ‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times