“The Patient, a 60-years old Caucasian male found unconscious in a trailer park of gypsies…”
So begins a strange — and apparently not copyedited — new case report in the World Journal of Emergency Surgery. The paper concerns a patient — perhaps we should call him Rasputin — who showed up with a bullet in his left lung but no entry wound that would explain its presence.
Naturally, the authors draw the obvious conclusions:
Piero Anversa‘s departure follows the dismissal of his suit last summer. Anversa filed the suit with colleague Annarosa Leri, claiming that an investigation into their work damaged their reputations:
they lost a multimillion-dollar offer to purchase their company, Autologous/Progenital; and both Plaintiffs have had possible employment offers at several institutions postponed.
Anversa’s lawyer, Tracey Miner, confirmed that he was moving:
The Huffington Post has retracted two blog posts by prominent Yale nutritionist David Katz after learning he had posted incredibly favorable reviews of a new novel — and not revealed that he had written the novel himself, under a pseudonym.
There’s no doubt Katz is a prolific writer — in addition to a couple hundred scientific articles and textbook chapters, Katz regularly blogs for the Huffington Post. He’s also the author of a novel, reVision, under the pen name Samhu Iyyam. Last year, Katz wrote a pair of incredibly favorable reviews of reVision on The Huffington Post that implied he had discovered the novel as a reader. The Huffington Post has taken them down, as blogger Peter Heimlich — yes, related to the maneuver — reported earlier this week. According to Heimlich, a 5-star Amazon review of “Iyyam’s” book, written by Katz, has also been removed.
In the reviews, there’s no hint that Katz is the author. In the first column, “Do We Need to Kill Our Heroes?,” published in January, Katz notes he was “delighted to find just such reflections [on that question] in my new favorite book, reVision.” Here’s the retraction note, of sorts, that appears on Huff Po in the column’s place:
Did you recently log onto your favorite journal’s website and see this? (For anyone who doesn’t want to bother clicking, it’s the video from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”) If so, your favorite journal was hijacked.
We’ve stumbled upon a trio of retractions published in August, 2013 from BMJ Case Reports for “redundant publication” to a group of researchers based in India.
Editors found that the reports, which were published between 2012 and 2013, had considerable “overlaps” with articles that had been published in other journals. Although one of the retracted authors was also an author on one of the overlapping articles, the rest of the authors have no obvious connection to the previous work.
The authors of the three retracted papers are based at the Modern Dental College and Research Centre in India.
The investigation, by the Istituto Nazionale per la Ricerca sul Cancro, found that there were multiple “figure anomalies.” According to the note:
An explanation of inadvertent error was given for some of the issues identified, while for two issues, a satisfactory explanation could not be provided.
First author Roberto Gherzi says none of his co-authors helped prepare the figures. The authors maintain that the conclusions are unaffected, but that assurance wasn’t enough for the journal. Here’s more from the lengthy retraction note, which provides some backstory on the “serious concerns” regarding the data:
A highly cited cancer researcher at MD Anderson has notched three major corrections, all associated with problems in figures. One note cites “human error” as the cause.
This version of Hurricane Isaac — based on the force of nature that hit Louisiana in 2012 — didn’t get very far. Atmospheric Research has retracted a paper on a simulation of the hurricane just a few months after it was published.
