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
The work of Sam W. Lee, a cancer biologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, has come under fire at Science Fraud lately over concerns about the possible reuse of images in his group’s published studies. Turns out there’s some there, there after all. The journal Current Biology has issued a pretty thorny correction for … Continue reading Image correction in Current Biology for Harvard’s Sam Lee
October, apparently, is “studies of retractions month.” First there was a groundbreaking study in PNAS, then an NBER working paper, and yesterday PLoS Medicine alerted us to a paper their sister journal, PLoS ONE, published last week, “A Comprehensive Survey of Retracted Articles from the Scholarly Literature.” The study, by Michael L. Grieneisen and Minghua Zhang, … Continue reading Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study
We’ve found another retraction for a paper bySangiliyandi Gurunathan, the former researcher at Kalasalingam University in India fired over multiple instances of data fabrication that also caused six Ph.D. students to get kicked out of their program. The retraction was published In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology – Animal in October 2011 but we only … Continue reading Fired Kalasalingam prof Gurunathan’s retraction count stands at eight
Duplication — sometimes referred to “self-plagiarism,” with a lack of precision — is a frequent cause of retractions. Usually, it’s of text that authors have used elsewhere. But what about data? In our new LabTimes column, we describe a hypothetical situation:
For some journals, thorough retraction notices are the rule — and, when misconduct is involved, the price authors pay for abusing the trust of the editors and the readers. Others seem to take a more casual approach. Guess which we think is best. Consider the case of a group of researchers in China led by … Continue reading Why retraction notices matter: Group’s repeated misuse of figures gets different play from five journals
ShouWei Han, who has been forced to retract six papers from various physiology journals following an investigation into his work by his former employer, the University of Louisville, has added another one to his tally. Here’s the notice, from the American Journal of Physiology: Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology:
Luk van Parijs, a former associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who was fired in 2005 after confessing to data fabrication and sentenced last year to six months of house arrest, can add another correction to his list of several retractions and errata. Here’s the notice for “Interferon γ is … Continue reading A correction for Luk van Parijs and colleagues for a “clerical error”
A group of researchers whose work has been under investigation at the University of Louisville has issued a correction for a paper in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology (AJRCMB). The correction follows three retractions each in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the AJRCMB, the latter of which made it clear … Continue reading Group investigated by University of Louisville corrects lung cancer paper after retracting six others
Have you seen this correction, from the September 8, 2011 issue of Nature, for “Tumour vascularization via endothelial differentiation of glioblastoma stem-like cells?” The figures and Supplementary figures of this Letter are affected by errors and improper editing. The correct figures are now provided, with an explanation of the variations. The original Letter has not … Continue reading We’re mostly wrong, but trust us: Our column on mega-corrections for Lab Times