Do you think the write-up of scientific results has gotten more rosy over time? If so, you’re right — the use of positive language in science abstracts has increased by 880% since 1974, according to new findings reported in the British Medical Journal.
Researchers led by Christiaan H Vinkers at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands found that, among PubMed abstracts: Continue reading Do science findings feel more novel, robust? They are — at least, in language
Authors have retracted papers from Cell Metabolism and the Journal of Biological Chemistry after an investigation in Singapore found issues, including falsified data. The investigation is ongoing, and two additional retractions, along with two corrections, are on the horizon.
The investigation looked into papers by first authors Sudarsanareddy Lokireddy, now a postdoc at Harvard, and Sandhya Sriram, a postdoc at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. Led by the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where some of the work was done, the investigation concluded that there were issues with six papers on which either Sriram or Lokireddy was first author.
All authors but Lokireddy have agreed to retractions or corrections. Ravi Kambadur of NTU, and Mridula Sharma at the National University of Singapore, are the last two authors on all the papers.
According to a notice from the NTU, the “investigation found a number of instances of alterations to data” in three papers on which Lokireddy is first author. One of those was retracted December 1 by Cell Metabolism: Continue reading Singapore investigation leads to two retractions, two more on the way
Anna Ahimastos, a heart researcher who faked patient records, has notched her 7th retraction.
One more paper is expected to be retracted, according to a spokesperson from her former institution, the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Australia.
As with the other retractions, the 2005 paper in Hypertension — about how the hypertension drug ramipril may help alleviate cardiovascular disease — is being pulled after Ahimastos admitted to scientific misconduct. She asserts the data remain valid, and has not signed the retraction notice.
The Hypertension paper has been cited 63 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the retraction note in full (the language will be familiar to readers who have been following this case):
Continue reading 7th retraction for heart researcher who faked patient records
Robert Weinberg, a prominent cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute, issued a correction to a paper in Oncogene in May, fixing two errors missed during proofing.
We found this one a little late, obviously. It also appears to be a relatively minor correction, not one that appears worthy of retraction. We’ve gotten feedback from readers asking why we cover corrections; we chose to flag this one because Weinberg has had such an impact on his field — he discovered the first tumor-causing gene in humans, as well as the first tumor-suppressor gene — and his papers are often highly cited. He also has issued five retractions in the past, most of which for papers whose first author was a member of his lab, who is not a co-author on the Oncogene paper.
Here’s the correction note for “Thrombospondin-1 repression is mediated via distinct mechanisms in fibroblasts and epithelial cells:”
Continue reading Cancer research pioneer Robert Weinberg corrected Oncogene paper
Although many scientists fear putting their data to the test of replication efforts, due to the embarrassment they’d feel if their findings couldn’t be repeated, a new study suggests those fears are unfounded.
The paper, published last week in PLOS ONE, found that scientists overestimate how much having non-replicable data will hurt their careers, and the community values those who are honest about what went wrong.
Specifically, as the authors note:
Continue reading Having non-replicable data may not hurt your rep, says study
This week at Retraction Watch featured a look at the huge problem of misidentified cell lines, a check-in with a company that retracted a paper as it was about to go public, and Diederik Stapel’s 58th retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: What do PhDs earn?; university refuses to release data; collaboration’s dark side
In Latin America, retractions for plagiarism and other issues have increased markedly — which may be a positive sign that editors and authors are paying closer attention to publishing ethics, according to a small study published in Science and Engineering Ethics.
The authors examined two major Latin American/Caribbean databases, which mostly include journals from Brazil, and have been indexing articles for more than 15 years. They found only 31 retractions, all of which appeared in 2008 or later. (Roughly half of the retractions were from journals indexed in the Thomas Reuters’ Journal of Citations Report® (JCR).)
This was a notable result, the authors write: Continue reading Is an increase in retractions good news? Maybe, suggests new study
Authors of a paper on the origin and function of a family of transmembrane proteins have retracted it after an investigation at the University of Florida revealed that an author had falsified some results.
This is the third paper with falsifications that Chi Leung, a former UF postdoc, is responsible for; this summer, we reported on a retraction and a partial retraction of two other papers on which Leung was a co-author. The case is currently under investigation by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity National Science Foundation, a UF spokeswoman tells us.
The problems in the paper, “Phylogenetic, expression, and functional analyses of anoctamin homologs in Caenorhabditis elegans,” occur in a figure that compares mRNA levels in control and experimental populations of C. elegans. The paper was published in the American Journal of Physiology, and has been cited eight times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
The retraction note explains that, according to the other authors, much of the data in the paper are valid:
Continue reading NSF investigating as more falsified results surface from mol bio researcher
Obesity has retracted a study that suggested overweight people may be less depressed than their slimmer counterparts in cultures where fat isn’t stigmatized, after realizing the authors lied about having ethical approval to conduct the research.
The authors claimed their research protocol had been approved by Norwegian and Bangladeshi ethical committees, but, according to the retraction note, part of the study “was conducted without the required approval of the university ethics board.” The journal’s managing editor told us that there is no evidence that there was harm to the study subjects.
Here’s more from the retraction note for “In Bangladesh, overweight individuals have fewer symptoms of depression than nonoverweight individuals:”
Continue reading Authors lied about ethics approval for study on obesity, depression
A group of astrophysicists has notched a pair of corrections for papers on galaxy clusters, thanks to an error that affected several figures in the papers, but not the overall conclusions.
The errors came in the catalog of “mock” galaxies that first author Fabio Zandanel, a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, created to model features that are found in clusters of galaxies. Two mistakes canceled each other out “almost perfectly,” says Zandanel, making the changes that resulted from them subtle.
Zandanel explained the errors to us:
Continue reading Astrophysicists issue two detailed corrections