The director of the Division of Investigative Oversight at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity is leaving the agency.
Susan Garfinkel told Retraction Watch that her last day is November 10. She is taking a position as assistant vice president in the Office of Research Compliance at The Ohio State University (OSU).
Garfinkel declined to comment on why she was leaving the agency:
Continue reading Division director leaving U.S. research watchdog after nearly 15 years
When Retraction Watch began in 2010, our co-founders Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus quickly realized they couldn’t keep up with the hundreds of retractions that appeared each year. And the problem has only gotten worse — although we’ve added staff, the number of retractions issued each year has increased dramatically. According to our growing database, just shy of 1,000 retractions were issued last year (and that doesn’t include expressions of concern and errata). So to get new notices in front of readers more quickly, we’ve started a new feature called “Caught our Notice,” where we highlight a recent notice that stood out from the others. If you have any information about what happened, feel free to contact us at [email protected].
Title: Combined hydrogels that switch human pluripotent stem cells from self-renewal to differentiation
What caught our attention: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Investigation finds “accidental mistakes” in PNAS stem cell paper
The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper that had been called “anti-vaccine pseudoscience,” a retraction following threats of violence against an editor, and an editorial board member’s resignation over how a journal handled a case of plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Systemic fraud in China; science without journals; authorship rules decay
Is having money linked to bad behavior?
A high profile paper published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) set out to answer that question — and found that yes, the more money people have, the more likely they are to lie, cheat, and steal. And the greedier they are, the worse they behave. But when a more recent paper tried to replicate some of those findings, it couldn’t.
It turns out, both the original paper and the paper that tried to replicate it contained errors. Although neither appear to affect the main conclusions, the authors of the 2016 replication recently issued a correction; the error in the 2012 paper was initially deemed too insignificant to correct, but the journal has decided to revisit the idea of issuing a correction.
A representative of PNAS told us that the replication paper — and reporting by Retraction Watch — is the reason why: Continue reading Are rich people meaner? While trying to find out, two teams find errors in each other’s work
In 1980, Leila Tov-Ruach published a book chapter in which she thanked the editor of the book, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “for the hospitality that made the writing of this paper possible.”
Normally, such an acknowledgement wouldn’t raise eyebrows. But, the trouble is, Tov-Ruach and Rorty are the same person: Leila Tov-Ruach is a pseudonym for Rorty, an accomplished philosopher. The University of California Press (UC Press) officially outed Rorty as Leila Tov-Ruach when it issued corrections for two chapters she published decades ago under the pseudonym (1, 2).
The corrections explain the author of the chapters is Rorty, who also edited the two books in which the chapters appear. Although Rorty didn’t note in the original versions of the books that she is Tov-Ruach, she has not tried to hide her pseudonym either. She has acknowledged she is Tov-Ruach in her CV, and at least some philosophers know about the pseudonym (1, 2).
Why would a philosopher—who has an impressive publishing record that spans 50 years and, at 85 years old, is still a lecturer at Harvard—choose to write under a fake name?
Continue reading An accomplished philosopher invented a pseudonym. Why?
A Swedish prosecutor has announced she won’t continue investigating a former star surgeon who has since fallen from grace.
Paolo Macchiarini made a name for himself by transplanting synthetic tracheas. After multiple patients died, however, allegations against the researcher have continued to swirl. He was dismissed from the Karolinska Institutet last year, after it reopened its misconduct investigation. The Swedish prosecutor was investigating Macchiarini’s role in the deaths of three out of four patients he operated on five times between 2011-2013.
Although the prosecution concluded that most of the operations proceeded “negligently,” it could not conclude Macchiarini was criminally responsible.
According to the public prosecutor Jennie Nordin:
Continue reading Swedish prosecutor won’t pursue criminal case against Macchiarini
A physics journal has retracted a 2014 paper after a reader discovered a slew of errors.
The paper, published in the Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, explored how the properties of nanofluids—fluids that contain nanoparticles—change as the fluid moves through different materials.
According to the editor-in-chief, Greg Naterer, an outside expert—Asterios Pantokratoras, based at Democritus University of Thrace in Greece—contacted the journal in May 2017 after discovering “errors with symbols in equations and figures.” The journal investigated the concerns and reached out to the paper’s corresponding author V. Ramachandra Prasad at Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science in India for a response; after several rounds of comments from Pantokratoras and Prasad, the journal concluded that the paper should be retracted.
Naterer explained: Continue reading “The results are essentially meaningless:” Typos, missing variables found throughout physics paper
At least one disgruntled co-author has triggered the retraction of a paper presenting a novel approach to treating a rare, genetically inherited condition.
The paper concerned research on Fragile X syndrome (FXS), characterized by both intellectual and physical abnormalities, which is linked autism. A compound that passed through phase 2 clinical trials in October 2015 appeared to partially treat FXS in mice in the study, published earlier this year.
The journal’s notice says the paper was retracted over a dispute among authors about the order in which they are listed on the paper: Continue reading Dispute over author order torpedoes paper on syndrome linked to autism
In 2016, researchers published a paper showing that an RNA molecule may be overactive in breast tumor tissue. But after reading the paper, three biologists believed the data supported the opposite conclusion.
What happened after that is a tale of misunderstandings and unnecessarily bruised feelings. We’ve seen plenty of cases where researchers ignore criticism, which at first glance seemed to be the case here. But upon closer inspection, it wasn’t. Continue reading A journal printed a sharp critique of a paper it had published. If only it had checked with the authors first.
A journal has published an expression of concern (EoC) for a paper on cancer genetics in mice, over a concern about data in some gel panels.
The EoC for “Suppression of intestinal tumorigenesis in Apc mutant mice upon Musashi-1 deletion,” appeared Sept. 21 in Journal of Cell Science (JCS).
With the notice, the journal says:
Continue reading Journal issues note of concern, tips off university’s research integrity office