As regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed, a number of sites have sprung up recently to examine — quite critically — papers that other scientists say are dodgy. There’s Abnormal Science, for example, which has not been updated since last February, and a Japanese whistleblower took to YouTube to demonstrate what was wrong with … Continue reading Facing legal threats, Science Fraud temporarily suspends posting
An accounting professor at a Boston-area college has resigned a month after publishing a retraction that has sparked extensive discussion on Retraction Watch. The Boston Globe reported late last week that James E. Hunton will leave Bentley University on December 31, with a spokesperson telling the paper he was leaving for “family and health reasons.” Hunton … Continue reading Accounting professor resigns following retraction
Terry S. Elton, a researcher at Ohio State University in Columbus who studies genetic expression in various heart conditions and Down syndrome, has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for fabricating and/or falsifying data in a number of NIH grants and resulting papers. According to an OSU statement sent to Retraction Watch … Continue reading ORI: Ohio State researcher manipulated two dozen figures in NIH grants, papers
An open letter to the Serbian science ministry – coinciding with the new government’s first 100 days in office – and an accompanying petition signed by 850 scientists so far, makes for pretty dim reading on the state of research ethics in Serbia. The systematic and apparently state-endorsed practice of artificially boosting one’s ratings in … Continue reading Serbian scientists decry systematic plagiarism, predatory publishing
Last December, we reported on a Journal of Immunology paper that was retracted after a Cardiff University investigation found the senior author had inappropriately manipulated images. The inquiry found that there had been “no intention to mislead and subsequent repeats of the original experiments have shown that the paper’s conclusions remain sound,” the university told … Continue reading Cardiff University looking into allegations of misconduct by group headed by its dean of medicine
Retraction Watch turns two on Friday (August 3), and while you might be stumped about what to get us, we’ll make things easy for you. All we want to mark the occasion is your … expertise. In their August 2012 issue, The Scientist published an opinion piece in which we call for a “Transparency Index” … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Transparency Index
There’s a story brewing in Belgium that is, as one local newspaper put it, worthy of a TV drama. Here’s our attempt at a summary: Jacques Donnez, chair of Catholic University of Louvain’s (UCL) gynecology department, and colleagues published two studies in Human Reproduction in 2010. One study claimed to show that a woman had given birth … Continue reading Fireworks: Belgian dispute over ovarian transplant findings includes claims of theft, arson
There has been plenty of interest in scientific fraud and misconduct lately — and not just on Retraction Watch — from major news outlets and government agencies, among other parties. The rate of retractions is increasing, and some fraudsters are even setting new records. That has focused attention on how institutions can prevent misconduct — … Continue reading How can institutions prevent scientific misconduct?
In the beginning, there was Scott Reuben. Well, not quite. Reuben, a Massachusetts anesthesiologist who fabricated data and briefly topped our list of most-retracted authors, didn’t invent research fraud, although he did spend six months in federal prison for his crimes. But his case was in no small measure responsible for the birth of this … Continue reading Is post-hoc statistical analysis the new fraud detection tool? A new review looks at fraudster Reuben’s work
Shikeagi Kato, an endocrinologist formerly of the University of Tokyo who resigned on March 31 amidst an investigation into his work, has retracted another paper, this one in Nature. Here’s the notice for “DNA demethylation for hormone-induced transcriptional derepression,” which was the subject of a correction last October: