We are pleased to present a guest post by Paolo Macchiarini, a surgeon best known for pioneering the creation of tracheas from cadavers and patients’ own stem cells. Macchiarini has faced some harsh criticisms over the years, including accusations of downplaying the risks of the procedure and not obtaining proper consent. We have covered the investigation, including the recent verdict by Karolinska Institutet that he acted “without due care,” but was not guilty of misconduct. He has taken issue with some aspects of our coverage, and has written a guest post to present his side of the story. We welcome such debate, and have included a short response at the end of his post.
I admire the underlying aims of Retraction Watch. That might come as a surprise to some readers of the site, given that it has a whole page devoted to me in its archives. However, I believe passionately that scientific misconduct is a serious crime. It not only undermines the very purpose of science, but has victims as well, especially in clinical specialisms. It is vital that misconduct is detected, that fraudulent work is retracted and those retractions made public. That is why I support Retraction Watch’s aims. But I am not writing in wholehearted support of the site. Continue reading Where I think Retraction Watch went wrong: A guest post from Paolo Macchiarini
An environmental journal is retracting an article about the risks of pesticides to groundwater after determining it contained data that “the authors did not have permission (implicit or explicit) to publish.”
We have discovered several errata for a New York City urologist, including in one paper that previously 
To one reader of a paper on a nerve cancer, the researchers, based at a hospital in China, seemed to have found a very large number of cases of a rare cancer to study. That observation triggered an investigation into the paper that led to its retraction — and the concern that the authors in the paper never did the research at all.