Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record. Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.” Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) by a group of authors in India.
When the University of Colorado at Denver completed an investigation in 2015 into the work of a former faculty member, the school recommended that nine papers be corrected or retracted. But six years after the close of that investigation, the researcher, urologist Hari Koul, has had just two papers retracted and one corrected. Multiple journal … Continue reading Exclusive: Six years after a misconduct investigation, more than half of suspect papers remain unflagged
Eric Lam, a highly-published cancer specialist, has been fired from his post at Imperial College London following a university investigation that found misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned. Lam’s work has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for some three years, dating back to a 2018 post pointing out suspicious images in a 2003 paper … Continue reading Imperial College London researcher fired for research misconduct
A journal has expressed regret over its sluggish response to image hijinx in a 2017 paper on the antimalarial properties of a kind of pea plant. The article, “Antimalarial efficacy of Pongamia pinnata (L) Pierre against Plasmodium falciparum (3D7 strain) and Plasmodium berghei (ANKA),” was written by P. V. V. Satish and K. Sunita, of … Continue reading ‘Regrettably it took too long to investigate and retract this paper.’
A university in China has revoked the medical degree of a researcher found guilty of having produced his dissertation with the help of a prodigious paper mill. As Elisabeth Bik noted last year in a post on PubPeer, the thesis by Bin Chen, a lung specialist at Soochow University, was one of 121 articles produced … Continue reading Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation
Retractions, expressions of concern, and corrections often arise from reader critiques sent by readers, whether those readers are others in the field, sleuths, or other interested parties. In many of those cases, journals seek the input of authors’ employers, often universities. In a recent paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review, longtime scientific publishing consultant … Continue reading How can universities and journals work together better on misconduct allegations?
Six months after we reported that journals had slapped expressions of concern on more than three dozen papers by a group of nutrition researchers in Iran, the retractions have started to trickle in. But clock started nearly two years ago, after data sleuths presented journals with questions about the findings in roughly 170 papers by … Continue reading “Yep, pretty slow”: Nutrition researchers lose six papers
Readers may roll their eyes at the various excuses authors use — including flooded labs and “my laptop was stolen” — when their data are unavailable for further scrutiny following questions. But here’s a case in which a stolen laptop is a real story. On April 5, Daniel Bolnick, the editor-in-chief of The American Naturalist, … Continue reading Ecologist who lost thesis awards earns expressions of concern after laptop stolen
Collaborations can be fraught. Ask David Ojcius. Ojcius, an emeritus professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Merced, and a department chair at the University of the Pacific, is up to four retractions, five corrections and an expression of concern in papers he wrote with collaborators in China and elsewhere. Ojcius … Continue reading On the perils of scientific collaboration from thousands of miles away
A retired Nepali professor and six others have been barred from research after plagiarism and duplicated images were found in 11 of their papers. Parashuram Mishra, a retired crystallographer at Tribhuvan University, in Nepal, is the lead author on all the studies. Most of the papers contain image duplications; the same figures were reused across … Continue reading Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers