This morning, our thoughts are with the people of Paris. The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper claiming dramatically higher rates of sexual trauma among men in the military, and a look at whether gender plays a role in peer review. Also: We’re hiring. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: The end of journals?; Impact Factor for sale; fake peer reviews earn funding bans
Heart researcher who faked patient data gets 4th retraction
A heart researcher who fabricated patient records for her studies on the blood pressure medication ramipril has earned her fourth retraction, and more are apparently on the way.
For readers who are new to this case: Things first unraveled for Anna Ahimastos when a subanalysis of a JAMA clinical trial revealed “anomalies,” triggering an investigation. After Ahimastos admitted to fabricating patient data, that JAMA paper and two others — including a small trial in Annals of Internal Medicine — were pulled. A spokesperson for her former employer, Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute, told us last week that they have requested more retractions:
Five papers and one letter are in the process of being retracted.
The Annals and this latest paper are included in the five papers, so we expect to see Continue reading Heart researcher who faked patient data gets 4th retraction
A bacterium may be anti-fungal, but it’s not anti-retraction
The authors of a paper on an anti-fungal bacterium couldn’t ward off a very common problem: plagiarism. The people credited on the paper, published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, apparently weren’t the original authors, according to the retraction note.
We’re not sure who the original authors are. The retraction note doesn’t elaborate much:
Continue reading A bacterium may be anti-fungal, but it’s not anti-retraction
How does gender influence publishing? A window into one journal
Male and female reviewers may rate papers the same way, regardless of whether the authors are male or female — but women are more likely to get the chance to review papers (and get their own papers reviewed) if other women are involved, according to studies of the review process at Functional Ecology.
In their comprehensive study of manuscripts put through the peer review process at the journal from January 2004 through June 2014, the authors found that the average review scores of manuscripts was roughly the same regardless of whether the reviewer — or editor — was male or female.
The authors also scanned papers submitted to the journal between 2010 and 2014 to look at the impact of gender among authors, and also found papers with female authors receive equivalent scores to papers by men: Continue reading How does gender influence publishing? A window into one journal
Psychologist Jens Forster settles case by agreeing to 2 retractions
Following questions about the veracity of multiple papers by his former employer, high-profile social psychologist Jens Förster has agreed to retract two papers as part of a deal with the German Society for Psychology (DGPs).
Last year, Förster had a paper retracted at the request of his former employer, the University of Amsterdam (UvA). In May, an investigation commissioned by UvA found that many of his experiments looked “too good to be true,” and eight papers showed strong signs of “low veracity.”
Just two of those papers are acknowledged in the settlement of a case by the DGPs against Förster, who currently works at Ruhr University Bochum. Here’s a translation of a notice from the DGPs from One Hour Translation:
Continue reading Psychologist Jens Forster settles case by agreeing to 2 retractions
When a paper is retracted, so is its previous correction–sometimes
Sometimes, the path to correcting the scientific record takes a few turns. In the case of a paper about a new cancer compound, authorship issues led to a correction and, ultimately, a retraction — along with a double-back to retract the earlier correction.
We reported on the first part of the story back in January: A 2011 paper that described a novel compound that could work as a drug for the side effects of chemotherapy was corrected in 2012 to add additional authors. But once the authors realized their supposedly novel compound had actually been synthesized by another author, they decided to retract the paper from Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry earlier this year, concluding “these facts made the paper inappropriate and unfaithful.”
Apparently, around the same time, the authors decided to retract the earlier correction, as well:
Continue reading When a paper is retracted, so is its previous correction–sometimes
Genetics paper retracted for using material “without permission and/or proper reference”
A review article about a tool used to link genes to traits and behaviors has been retracted for including content “without permission and/or proper reference.”
Corresponding author Ali Masoudi-Nejad at the University of Tehran told us that the retraction occurred mostly because the paper included many figures and tables from other sources, and he didn’t realize they needed to seek permission from both the author and the copyright-holder (ie, the publisher). He added that he doubts he is the only one to make this mistake: Continue reading Genetics paper retracted for using material “without permission and/or proper reference”
BMC retracts paper by scientist who banned use of his software by immigrant-friendly countries
A BioMed Central journal has pulled the paper of a scientist who decided to prohibit countries that are friendly to immigrants from using his software.
Recently, German scientist Gangolf Jobb declared that starting on October 1st scientists working in countries that are, in his opinion, too welcoming to immigrants — including Great Britain, France and Germany — could no longer use his Treefinder software, which creates trees showing potential evolutionary relationships between species. He’d already banned its use by U.S. scientists in February, citing the country’s “imperialism.” Last week, BMC Evolutionary Biology pulled the paper describing the software, noting it now “breaches the journal’s editorial policy on software availability.”
Many scientists have used Jobb’s software: The BMC paper that describes it, “TREEFINDER: a powerful graphical analysis environment for molecular phylogenetics,” has been cited 745 times since it was published in 2004, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Jobb told Retraction Watch that the software is still available to any scientist willing to travel to non-banned countries, and that he does not care about the retraction: Continue reading BMC retracts paper by scientist who banned use of his software by immigrant-friendly countries
Join our team: Retraction Watch is hiring a second staff writer
Thanks to a generous grant, we’re in the enviable position of being able to add a second staff writer. Which means we’re looking for applicants.
The job is not for the faint of heart. It’s definitely fast-paced; our staff writer will be expected to write an average of two posts per day, and feel comfortable dropping the day’s plan to jump on a breaking story. Our writers also contribute to bigger projects such as the feature we wrote for Nature on fake peer reviews.
We’re looking for Continue reading Join our team: Retraction Watch is hiring a second staff writer
Can linguistic patterns identify data cheats?
Cunning science fraudsters may not give many tells in their data, but the text of their papers may be a tipoff to bad behavior.
That’s according to a new paper in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology by a pair of linguists at Stanford University who say that the writing style of data cheats is distinct from that of honest authors. Indeed, the text of science papers known to contain fudged data tends to be more opaque, less readable and more crammed with jargon than untainted articles.
The authors, David Markowitz and Jeffrey Hancock, also found that papers with faked data appear to be larded up with references – possibly in an attempt to make the work more cumbersome for readers to wade through, or to tart up the manuscript to make it look more impressive and substantial. As Markowitz told us: Continue reading Can linguistic patterns identify data cheats?