An oncology journal has retracted a review article on the hypothetical link between Covid-19 and cancer after determining that the medical writer who authored the work hadn’t done all the writing herself. The paper, “Clinical sequelae of the novel coronavirus: does COVID-19 infection predispose patients to cancer?” appeared in Future Oncology in May and was … Continue reading Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism
The authors of a 2017 paper on resistance to cancer chemotherapy have retracted and replaced the article after learning that it included duplicated material from previously published work by one of the duo. The article, “The evolution and ecology of resistance in cancer therapy,” was written by Robert Gatenby and Joel Brown, of the Moffitt … Continue reading Author blames “multitasking dementia” for duplicated cancer paper
An article claiming that skin pigmentation is related to aggression and sexuality in humans will be retracted, Elsevier announced today. The study, “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?” was published online in Personality and Individual Differences, an Elsevier journal, on March 15, 2012. … Continue reading Elsevier journal to retract 2012 paper widely derided as racist
Score one for responsiveness. In mid-May, we reported on the retraction of three review articles by Joachim Boldt, whose papers continue to fall despite his having been exposed as a fraudster a decade ago. At the time, we wondered why another journal, Anesthesia & Analgesia, hadn’t also pulled reviews by Boldt that it had published … Continue reading Slow but steady: Anesthesiology researcher with more than 100 retractions will earn two more
A journal has retracted three review articles by Joachim Boldt, the German anesthetist who currently occupies the second spot on the Retraction Watch leaderboard with 103 retractions. The reviews, which appeared in Intensive Care Medicine, cover articles by Boldt that were published both well before and the same year as his scandal broke in 2010. … Continue reading A ‘very cautious’ process: Journal retracts reviews by anesthesiologist found to have committed fraud a decade ago
We’ve been tracking retractions of papers about COVID-19 as part of our database. Here’s a running list, which will be updated as needed. (For some context on these figures, see this post, our letter in Accountability in Research and the last section of this Nature news article. Also see a note about the terminology regarding … Continue reading Retracted coronavirus (COVID-19) papers
Leonard Zelig, meet Zvi Herzig. The journal Circulation has issued an expression of concern about a 2015 letter, putatively written by Herzig, in which the author poked holes in a review article about e-cigarettes. According to the EoC, however, Herzig, like Zelig, may be a bit of a chameleon.
A group of researchers based at Harvard University have retracted an influential 2017 letter in Nature after a change in lab personnel led to the discovery of errors in the analysis. The article, “Microglia-dependent synapse loss in type I interferon-mediated lupus,” emerged from a collaboration including scientists at Harvard Medical School, the Rockefeller University in … Continue reading Harvard group retracts Nature paper
A pathologist in Chicago has lost five papers for image manipulation and other problems. The first retraction for Yashpal Kanwar, of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, appeared in 2013, for a review article published earlier that year in the American Journal of Physiology Renal Physiology. According to the notice:
The journal Cureus is retracting three articles by a mashup of authors from Pakistan and the United States for plagiarism, which the researchers blame on their use of a hired gun to prepare the papers. The articles were published over a roughly one-month stretch in August and September 2018 and covered an impressively polymathic range … Continue reading “We got scammed:” Authors “sincerely apologize” for plagiarism they blame a ghostwriter for