The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of 11 papers by a controversial researcher in Italy, and a look at the controversy over lead in the water supply. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
This week at Retraction Watch featured two Office of Research Integrity findings, and retractions in the Voinnet and Hanna cases. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Karel Bezouška, the Czech biochemist who was caught on hidden camera breaking into a lab fridge to fake results, has turned it up to eleven with two new retractions. Both retractions appeared in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, one in October 2014 and one in January 2015. His story began two decades ago in 1994, when he published … Continue reading Two more retractions bring lab break-in biochemist up to eleven
Olivier Voinnet, a researcher at ETH in Zurich who has corrected a number of his papers following critiques on PubPeer dating from late last year, is retracting a 2004 paper in The Plant Cell, according to the journal’s publisher. Voinnet, the winner of the 2013 Rössler Prize, is a high-profile scientist, and scrutiny of his work has only grown … Continue reading Retraction to appear for beleaguered plant researcher Olivier Voinnet
A 2014 Cancer Cell paper became the subject of an erratum in January 2015, shortly after PubPeer members began criticizing the data. However, many issues brought up by commenters weren’t addressed in the correction notice, including a figure that might be two experiments spliced together to look like one. The paper, led by Guido Franzoso at Imperial College … Continue reading Cancer Cell issues big correction over “incorrectly cropped” figures, other issues
PNAS has retracted a paper on the cancer-causing Epstein-Barr virus just two months after publication, in a notice that fingers a now-former graduate student for manipulating figures. The paper tries to explain how Epstein-Barr virus blocks the immune system’s attempts to destroy it. According to the notice, the three “nonexperimentalist authors” – identified in the paper as two … Continue reading Authors retract PNAS Epstein-Barr virus paper for “anomalous and duplicated” figures
Sorry, fans of papers by Maggie Simpson and I. P. Freely, your days of chortling may be coming to an end. Springer, responding to a case last year in which it and IEEE had to eventually retract more than 120 papers created by SCIgen, is making software that detects such manuscripts freely available. From a … Continue reading An end to fake papers? New software to check for SCIgen-created manuscripts
This week at Retraction Watch featured retractions by a high-profile cancer researcher, and a loss in court for PubPeer. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The week at Retraction Watch featured a number of legal cases by scientists trying to suppress criticism about their work. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Happy New Year! This week, we took a look back at 2014. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: