A DC court has denied part of George Washington University’s motion to dismiss a $8 million lawsuit by a biologist who claims his employer mishandled an investigation into his work.
Last spring, GW filed a motion to dismiss the case, brought forward by Rakesh Kumar, who has three retractions. A judge has allowed the case to proceed, honoring parts of the school’s motion to dismiss, but denying most of it.
Following a “thorough investigation,” the Journal of Conservative Dentistry (JCD)has retracted a paper after concluding that the first author stole the text from another paper when peer reviewing it for a different journal.
The JCD decided that the 2013 paper about white spot lesions and inhibiting the growth of the bacteria Streptococcus mutans in the mouth is a “verbatim copy” of a paper that was rejected by the International Journal of PaediatricDentistry in 2012 butpublished by The Journal of Clinical Pediatric Dentistry in 2014.
The first author denied the charges, saying she had finished the paper before reviewing the other, which she suggested rejecting.
Can we teach good behavior in the lab? That’s the premise behind a number of interventions aimed at improving research integrity, invested in by universities across the world and even private companies. Trouble is, a new review from the Cochrane Library shows that there is little good evidence to show these interventions work. We spoke with authors Elizabeth Wager (on the board of directors of our parent organization) and Ana Marusic, at the University of Split School of Medicine in Croatia.
Retraction Watch: Let’s start by talking about what you found – looking at 31 studies (including 15 randomized controlled trials) that included more than 9500 participants, you saw there was some evidence that training in research integrity had some effects on participants’ attitudes, but “minimal (or short-lived) effects on their knowledge.” Can you talk more about that, including why the interventions had little impact on knowledge?Continue reading Do interventions to reduce misconduct actually work? Maybe not, says new report
We have seen plenty of projects unravel due to disputes over authorship, so we know this is a crucial issue in publishing. And the more authors are involved, the more issues can arise. So what happens when there are hundreds – or even thousands of authors on a single paper? Spencer Klein, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Research Physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, offers some suggestions for how mega-collaborations could think differently about authorship.
Over the past few years, Retraction Watch has hosted a number of interesting discussions about the meaning of authorship. Those discussions have, so far, missed one important issue: What should one do in mega-collaborations, with memberships the size of a large village? In my field (astro/nuclear/particle physics), papers with hundreds of authors are common, with recent papers by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, the two large experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, having 2,870 and 2,270 authors respectively. One 2015 joint paper appears to have broken an authorship record with more than 5100 authors. (It’s also an increasing issue in other fields, such as genetics – one 2015 paper listed 1,000 authors.)
A researcher formerly based at the National Cancer Institute has earned three new retractions following an investigation that found she committed misconduct.
In May of last year, Stephanie Watkins, who now works at Loyola Medicine, earned one two retraction, which mentions a review by an investigation committee at the National Institutes of Health. Two of the new notes, published in Cancer Research, mention the review as well, and cite data falsification in a figure as the reason for retraction. Watkins is the only author that did not agree to those retractions.
There may be more changes to the literature — an editor at another cancer journal told us the journal is awaiting a decision from the Office of Research Integrity before deciding what to do with a paper by Watkins, given that she does not agree with the misconduct charges.
Gastroenterology has retracted a 2012 article on GI cancers associated with AIDS after the authors, from the National Cancer Institute, acknowledged that a “programming” error led them to overestimate the incidence of the tumors.
Elsevier has now retracted the seven papers it flagged in October as being affected by fake peer reviews.
If you’re not keeping track, we are: We have logged a total of about 300 retractions for fake peer review, in which some aspect of the peer-review process becomes compromised — for instance, in the case of the newly retracted papers, authors appear to have created fake email accounts in order to pose as reviewers and give the green light to their own papers.
The same retraction note applies to five of the recently retracted papers:
Amidst an ongoing investigation by the University of Belgrade in Serbia into allegations of duplication by neurobiologist Lidija Radenović, a journal is planning to retract another one of her papers.
Radenović has already racked up six retractions; Elinor Ben-Menachem, the chief editor of the journal, Acta Neurologica Scandinavica, confirmed her journal is planning to retract one paper co-authored by Radenović, but did not specify which one. After digging around on the journal’s website, we found only one paper co-authored by Radenović, which was a 2005 study about the molecular changes that follow stroke.
A paper on the characteristics of a photodiode has been retracted corrected because one of the authors “does not want this article for her academic career.”
We don’t often see this kind of reasoning in retraction notices, since adding to one’s publication record is generally a good thing. But occasionally papers do get pulled when researchers are included against their wishes.
A DC court has denied part of George Washington University’s motion to dismiss a $8 million lawsuit by a biologist who claims his employer mishandled an investigation into his work.
