A researcher who co-authored a now-retracted paper claiming that two vaccinated people died of COVID-19 for every three deaths prevented has had an affiliation with a Polish university terminated. Yesterday, Poznan University tweeted about the researcher, Harald Walach: Today, it confirmed the move in a statement:
The retractions appear to be trickling in for Thomas Webster, a once-prominent chemistry researcher who left his post at Northeastern University after nearly 70 of his papers were flagged on PubPeer for concerns about the data in the studies. But while the publisher of a journal he co-founded — and left earlier this year — … Continue reading Publisher won’t retract most papers by chemist editor-in-chief who left university post under a cloud
Last December, Elisabeth Bik notified journals about 45 articles by a researcher in China which struck her as suspicious. Within weeks, one of those journals — DNA and Cell Biology — had retracted the paper she’d flagged. That reassuringly brisk response appears to have been an anomaly in the case of Hua Tang, of Tianjin … Continue reading ‘We apologize again for the inadvertent mistakes during the assembly of data due to our carelessness’
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Kentucky professor resigns ahead of vote that could have stripped … Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘Lab leak’ and journals; a murder rocks Chinese academia; NIH removes lab heads from grants after harassment claims
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?