PubPeer is having a good day.
In a new ruling, a trio of judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed a 2015 decision mandating the site reveal the identity of anonymous commenters after a scientist sued them, claiming they cost him a job offer.
The judges stated that Fazlul Sarkar, the scientist suing the commenters, can continue pursuing a defamation case, but: Continue reading PubPeer wins appeal of court ruling to unmask commenters
Two remaining charges against a Parkinson’s researcher recently convicted of fraud have been dropped by an Australian court.
In October, Caroline Barwood, formerly at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, was found guilty of five out of seven charges. Subsequently, Barwood was handed two suspended sentences: one for two years, and another for 15 months, both to be served concurrently. She will not serve jail time.
Initially, Barwood pleaded not guilty to the three charges of fraud and four instances of attempted fraud — unlike her former UQ colleague Bruce Murdoch, who pleaded guilty to 17 fraud-related charges in March, and also earned himself a two-year suspended sentence.
Barwood was found guilty of five charges against her, but the jury could not reach a majority verdict on one count of fraud and another of attempted fraud. She was asked to re-attend court for a “mention.”
On December 6, those charges were withdrawn. Barwood told us: Continue reading Remaining fraud charges withdrawn for Parkinson’s researcher
If you think something is amiss with your data, running an experiment again to figure out what’s going on is a good move. But it’s not always possible.
A team of researchers in Seoul recently found themselves in a bind when they needed to check their work, but were out of a key substance: breast milk.
The shortage led them to the retract their 2016 paper on a micronutrient found in breast milk that helps protect infants’ retinas. “Association between lutein intake and lutein concentrations in human milk samples from lactating mothers in South Korea,” was published online last spring in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Here’s the retraction notice:
Continue reading Researchers retract paper after they run out of breast milk
A physics journal has retracted a 2016 study after learning that the author published it without the knowledge or permission of the funder, which had a confidentiality agreement in place for the work.
According to the retraction notice in Applied Physics Letters, the paper also lifted content from other researchers without due credit. Given the “legal issue” associated with the breach of confidentiality, the journal has decided to remove the paper entirely.
Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Physics journal removes study for breach of confidentiality
When it comes to detecting image manipulation, the more tools you have at your disposal, the better. In a recent issue of Science and Engineering Ethics, Lars Koppers at TU Dortmund University in Germany and his colleagues present a new way to scan images. Specifically, they created an open-source software that compares pixels within or between images, looking for similarities, which can signify portions of an image has been duplicated or deleted. Koppers spoke with us about the program described in “Towards a Systematic Screening Tool for Quality Assurance and Semiautomatic Fraud Detection for Images in the Life Sciences,” and how it can be used by others to sleuth out fraud.
Retraction Watch: Can you briefly describe how your screening system works?
Continue reading Sleuthing out scientific fraud, pixel by pixel
Drumroll please.
The tally of retractions in MEDLINE — one of the world’s largest databases of scientific abstracts — for the last fiscal year has just been released, and the number is: 664.
Earlier this year, we scratched our heads over the data from 2015, which showed retractions had risen dramatically, to 684. The figures for this fiscal year — which ended in September — have held relatively steadily at that higher number, only dropping by 3%. (For some sense of scale, there were just shy of 870,000 new abstracts indexed in MEDLINE in FY2016; 664 is a tiny fraction of this figure, and of course not all of the retractions were of papers published in FY2016.)
Of note: In FY2014, there were fewer than 500 retractions — creating an increase of nearly 40% between 2014 and 2015. (Meanwhile, the number of citations indexed by MEDLINE rose only few percentage points over the same time period.) Which means the retraction rate in the last two years is dramatically higher than in 2014.
We have often wondered whether the retraction rate would ever reach a plateau, as the community’s ability to find problems in the literature catches up with the amount of problems present in the literature. But based on two years of data, we can’t say anything definitive about that.
Here’s an illustration of retraction data from recent years:
Continue reading Retractions holding steady at more than 650 in FY2016
On December 31st 2014, a pioneer in the study of inflammatory bowel disease passed away. An obituary published in the Journal of Digestive Diseases shortly thereafter is typical enough: It describes his achievements, importance to his patients, and battle with pancreatic cancer.
But “Loss in the Last Day of 2014: a Eulogy for Prof. Bing Xia” has now been retracted.
This is the first time we’ve seen an obituary pulled from a journal. Unfortunately, this was not a case of a premature obituary (which happens more often than you’d think)– the researcher did actually die, but it appears the journal published the obituary in the wrong place.
The retraction notice, published earlier this year, explains:
Continue reading A first for us: Journal retracts obituary (but not for the reasons you think)
This week at Retraction Watch featured some big numbers: How a request to correct a single paper turned into 19 retractions, and 18 tips for giving horrible presentations. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Paying peer reviewers; the embargo debate; crushed by data
In August, Science told us it was considering adding an Expression of Concern to a high-profile paper about how human pollution is harming fish — and yesterday, the journal did it.
The move comes after a group of researchers alleged the paper contains missing data, and the authors followed a problematic methodology. In September, however, the co-authors’ institution, Uppsala University in Sweden, concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to launch a misconduct investigation.
The notice from Science stems from the theft of a computer carrying some of the paper’s raw data, making it impossible to reproduce some of its findings: Continue reading Stolen data prompts Science to flag debated study of fish and plastics
The BMJ has released a detailed correction to a much-debated article critiquing the expert report underlying the U.S. dietary guidelines.
After the article was published in 2015, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) organized a letter signed by more than 100 researchers, urging the publication to retract the article. Today, the journal said it found “no grounds” to do so.
However, in a press release accompanying the announcement of the correction, the BMJ notes that some aspects of the CSPI’s criticisms were merited.
Editor in chief Fiona Godlee said in a statement: