A scientist who lost 11 papers for fake peer review and other reasons went to court to pin the misconduct on a coauthor – and received a favorable judgment. The retractions for Aram Mokarizadeh, a biomedical researcher previously affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, were part of a batch of 58 … Continue reading Scientist goes to court to clear his name after fake peer review retractions
Weeks after the British Medical Journal corrected a press release about nine retractions and dozens of expressions of concern to mark articles by a prominent concussion expert, a spokesperson for the journal told us it’s still “an ongoing effort” to identify all the articles on which the expert is the sole author. The concussion researcher, … Continue reading BMJ says it’s “an ongoing effort” to find articles by plagiarizing concussion researcher Paul McCrory
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 268. There are more than 36,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most … Continue reading Weekend reads: A whistleblower finds possible misconduct — again; embracing failure; radical transparency for journals
Following a Retraction Watch story about a 2004 paper that had been copied twice since its publication, one of the journals involved has taken down its version of the article. Last month, we reported that an undergraduate student researching her thesis had found two papers that copied material from “Models of the medical consultation: opportunities … Continue reading “A huge relief”: Journal takes down plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch reporting
A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out. The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months. But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job … Continue reading Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. This week, it’s a special double edition of Weekend Reads, thanks to a site outage that meant we couldn’t post last Saturday. The last two weeks at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 267. … Continue reading Weekend reads, double edition: Science’s ‘nasty Photoshopping problem’; Dr. Oz’s publication ban; image manipulation detection software
In January 2022, motivated by our experience with eClinicalMedicine, we wrote about mishandling of published errors by journal editors. We had noticed that the methods used for the analysis of a cluster randomized trial published in the journal were invalid. Using a valid approach, we reanalyzed the raw data, which were shared with us by the … Continue reading When editors confuse direct criticism with being impolite, science loses
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Paper co-authored by Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi to be marked with expression of concern Catch and kill: What it’s like to try to get a NEJM paper corrected Paper co-authored by sleuth Elisabeth Bik marked … Continue reading Weekend reads: A journal ends accept/reject in peer review; more of a Nobelist’s work comes under scrutiny; CNRS director says what he thinks of sleuths
Another article co-authored by Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi will be marked with an expression of concern for image duplication, Retraction Watch has learned. Demasi’s reporting has cast doubt on statins and raised the possibility of a link between wi-fi and brain tumors – controversial claims she and co-authors have previously told us they believe made … Continue reading Paper co-authored by Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi to be marked with expression of concern
Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a letter to the editor and a response reflecting a quite modest correction. Essentially, the three letters “miR” will be removed from throughout a manuscript as the data, to date, do not support there being a human novel microRNA blood-based biomarker for myocarditis, as the … Continue reading Catch and kill: What it’s like to try to get a NEJM paper corrected