The week at Retraction Watch saw news of a settled lawsuit, and had us celebrating our sixth anniversary with the announcement of a new partnership. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A PhD student has been expelled from a university in China after publishing a paper in PLOS ONE without the permission of her co-authors, and using an external company to complete some of the work. PLOS ONE has now retracted the paper, noting that they were tipped off to the problems by a reader who … Continue reading PhD student expelled for submitting paper without co-authors’ consent
A former postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh has issued his first retraction after an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) concluded he had falsified and/or fabricated data in two published papers. The ORI investigation into the work of Kenneth Walker, determined that he had falsified and/or fabricated quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) … Continue reading 1st retraction for ex-Pitt postdoc who admitted to doctoring data
A diabetes researcher who sued to stop a publisher from retracting his papers has just received his seventh retraction. The latest retraction for Mario Saad, who is based at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) in São Paulo, Brazil, is for a PLOS ONE paper (which was altered last year by a mega-correction). Although an institutional … Continue reading Researcher who sued to stop retractions earns his 7th
A journal has retracted a paper by a leading diabetes researcher — who has also issued three corrections — after questions about her research were raised on PubPeer. Kathrin Maedler — who works at the University of Bremen in Germany — corrected another paper in 2014. All of the notices are dated from 2015, and all describe issues with … Continue reading Diabetes researcher logged 1 retraction, 3 correx, after PubPeer comments
The week at Retraction Watch featured an unwitting co-author and a painful example of doing the right thing. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The week at Retraction Watch featured news that a religion journal wouldn’t be retracting a paper despite evidence of forgery in the evidence it relied on, and also news that we’re hiring. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
An investigation at Wayne State University has prompted five retractions for a scientist who is suing PubPeer commenters after they criticized his work on the site. The investigation into Fazlul Sarkar and his co-authors found that the papers contain images that were “inappropriately manipulated” or “inappropriately re-used and re-labeled.” All five retraction notices are from the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry. … Continue reading Researcher suing PubPeer commenters earns 5 retractions following investigation
Researchers have fixed a number of papers after mistakenly reporting that people who hold conservative political beliefs are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness. As one of the notices specifies, now it appears that liberal political beliefs are linked with psychoticism. That paper also swapped ideologies when reporting on people higher in neuroticism and … Continue reading Conservative political beliefs not linked to psychotic traits, as study claimed
Biologists are retracting three papers after the journal concluded they contain reused images, designed to represent different experiments. The authors stand by the conclusions, some of which they say have been “extensively validated.” The Journal of Biological Chemistry used image analysis software to evaluate the images, first published at least a decade ago. Unfortunately, the raw … Continue reading Authors reused images in three papers, concludes journal probe