Psst…Need a PhD thesis? That’ll be $63,000

Cath Ellis

Many readers may have heard whisper of companies that offer a range of writing services — some more ethical than others. Although some companies offer to edit and polish writing, others can write PhD research proposals, masters’ theses, or even a dissertation. In other words, the students engage in so-called “contract cheating” — paying someone else to produce work they pass of as their own. We spoke to Cath Ellis at UNSW Sydney, first author of a recent analysis in the International Journal for Educational Integrity, about the extent of the problem, and what troubles her most about these services.

Retraction Watch: How many sites appear to offer PhD theses, which then might get published? Or any other services that could end up in the published literature (say, by even established researchers)?

Continue reading Psst…Need a PhD thesis? That’ll be $63,000

Retracted letter about vaccine safety made potentially “slanderous” claims

Last October, David Hawkes read a letter to the editor that shocked him: It alleged Hawkes and a colleague had lied about their professional affiliations.

Hawkes told Retraction Watch that he contacted the journal Toxicology on October 19 to complain that the letter contained “numerous factual errors that could adversely affect our professional standing,” and requested the journal retract it as soon as possible. Hawkes told the editors of Toxicology:

…the claims about both myself and Joanne Benhamu are factually incorrect and we have received professional advice that they could be considered slanderous.

The journal retracted the letter yesterday, four months after Hawkes’ request. Continue reading Retracted letter about vaccine safety made potentially “slanderous” claims

Author: Journal’s unapproved edits distorted my ideas

Researcher Floribert Patrick Endong had been looking forward to seeing his paper in print. Several months after he submitted it to Gender Studies, the journal told him in March that it was online. But when he read it, Endong was disappointed to see some changes he had not approved, which he believed “deformed much of the initial text.”

It turns out, the journal “did not allow me to vet the changes before publication,” he explained. Continue reading Author: Journal’s unapproved edits distorted my ideas

PNAS asks D.C. court to dismiss $10 million defamation lawsuit

WASHINGTON, DC — Lawyers for the National Academy of Sciences have asked a District of Columbia court to dismiss a $10 million defamation suit brought by a Stanford University professor.

Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford who has published research about the future of renewable energy, alleged he was defamed in a June 2017 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In September 2017, Jacobson sued both NAS and the first author of the article for libel in D.C. Superior Court. He also sued NAS for breach of contract.

In response, the co-defendants have each asked the court to dismiss the case under a D.C. law designed to curb so-called “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPP). Anti-SLAPP laws, which D.C. and 28 states have enacted, generally offer defendants a way to counter what they consider burdensome lawsuits that may have the effect of chilling speech on important issues. In a memo filed Nov. 27, 2017, in support of its motion, NAS claimed that Jacobson filed the suit: Continue reading PNAS asks D.C. court to dismiss $10 million defamation lawsuit

Target of $2M recruitment grant falsified several images: ORI

A former NIH postdoc recruited to a tenure-track position last year committed multiple acts of misconduct in two papers, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

According to the new notice, issued by the ORI, Colleen Skau altered results and multiple figures across the papers, published in Cell and PNAS.

The misconduct occurred while she was completing a postdoc in the Cell Biology and Physiology Center at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Last year, The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced that Skau was among eight targets of a recruitment grant; the grant, totaling $2 million USD, was designed to help entice her to accept a tenure-track position at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. We’ve been unable to find a faculty page for Skau at UT Southwestern, and have contacted the university to determine whether she accepted a position there.

According to the ORI, Skau:

Continue reading Target of $2M recruitment grant falsified several images: ORI

When — and how — should journals flag papers that don’t quite meet retraction criteria?

Readers of Retraction Watch will be no strangers to the practice of issuing Expressions of Concern — editorial notices from journals that indicate a paper’s results may not be valid. While a good idea in theory — so readers can be aware of potential issues while an investigation is underway — in practice, it’s a somewhat flawed system. As we (and others before us) have shown, so-called EOCs can linger indefinitely, leaving researchers unsure how to interpret a flagged paper.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) agrees that the system has room for improvement. Although COPE has included advice on when to issue EOCs within its retraction guidelines, it has allotted time in the next COPE Forum (Feb 26) to discuss the topic. Some questions it’s considering:

Continue reading When — and how — should journals flag papers that don’t quite meet retraction criteria?

Weekend reads: We’re back! (We hope); the data thugs; heroes of retraction

As many of our readers will know, we’ve been having serious technical issues with the site. We’re cautiously optimistic that they’ve been solved, so although we’re still working on fixes, we’re going to try posting again. Thanks for your ongoing patience.

This week, we posted at our sister site, Embargo Watch. Here are those posts:

And here’s what’s been happening elsewhere over the past few weeks: Continue reading Weekend reads: We’re back! (We hope); the data thugs; heroes of retraction

“Major advance” in solar power retracted for reproducibility issues

The authors of a highly cited 2016 research letter on a way to improve the efficiency of solar panels have retracted their work following “concerns about the reproducibility.”

Given the potential importance of the data, it would be nice to know what exactly went wrong, and why. However, the retraction notice doesn’t provide many details, and doesn’t even specify if the authors did indeed fail to reproduce the data.

The letter, titled “Graded bandgap perovskite solar cells,” was published in Nature Materials by a group out of the University of California at Berkeley and the affiliated Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The 2016 article has been cited 16 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it the ranking of “highly cited.”

Berkeley heralded the findings in a press release as a “major advance” in the field of solar energy:

Continue reading “Major advance” in solar power retracted for reproducibility issues

Should a journal retract a paper the authors didn’t know contained bad data?

A medical journal has retracted a 2016 paper over a series of errors, prompting it to lose faith in the paper overall. The authors have objected to the decision, arguing the errors weren’t their fault and could be revised with a correction — rather than retracting what they consider “an important contribution” to an ongoing debate in medicine.

The paper explored the so-called weekend effect—that patients admitted to the emergency department on the weekend are more likely to die than those admitted on a weekday. Whether the weekend effect is real is not clear. Some studies have supported the phenomenon in certain areas of medicine, but others (including the now-retracted paper) have failed to find an effect.

First author Mohammed A. Mohammed, based at the University of Bradford in the UK, told Retraction Watch that the errors were introduced by one of the hospitals that provided them the data:

Continue reading Should a journal retract a paper the authors didn’t know contained bad data?

Author retracts Nature paper on Asia’s glaciers flagged for data error

A glacier researcher has retracted a Nature paper after mistakenly underestimating glacial melt by as much as a factor of ten.

In September, the journal tagged “Asia’s glaciers are a regionally important buffer against drought,” originally published in May 2017 by Hamish Pritchard,a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, with an expression of concern, notifying readers of the mistake. It turns out, Pritchard had missed the fine print on a data set; a figure he thought represented water loss over a decade covered, in fact, only a year.

In September, Pritchard told Retraction Watch that the mix-up strengthened his argument that glacial melt was important to Asia’s water supply.

However, in the retraction notice, published today, he indicated that the mistake affected other conclusions: Continue reading Author retracts Nature paper on Asia’s glaciers flagged for data error