When Nature published a paper in 2011 describing a compound extracted from a pepper plant that appeared to kill cancer cells but leave healthy cells unscathed, it got some attention. Of course, the news caught the media’s eye, but also that of other researchers, who have since jumped on the concept, and continued to study … Continue reading Nature cancer paper that raised animal welfare concerns is retracted
A former postdoc at the U.S. VA Health Care System in Albuquerque, N.M., committed misconduct in three papers, the agency announced today. Alba Chavez-Dozal, who studied the basic science underpinnings of infectious diseases, had three papers retracted between 2015 and 2016. In findings dated July 18, 2018, but released today, the VA said that Chavez-Dozal, … Continue reading Former VA postdoc committed misconduct, banned from agency research for four years
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured, unfortunately, a likely DDOS attack that kept our site dark … Continue reading Weekend reads: “Chronic compulsive writing syndrome;” a new way to respond to rejection; rewards for a center that doesn’t yet exist
In April 2015, two high-profile chemistry bloggers — and their commenters — raised questions about a paper that had been published in PLOS ONE some 18 months earlier. More than three years later, the journal has now retracted the paper, with a notice that echoes the 2015 blog posts. So what took so long? PLOS … Continue reading Three years after questions surfaced, PLOS ONE retracts paper about potential antibiotic
Fakery. Ignored whistleblowers. Sabotage. Subterfuge. Reading reports of institutional investigations into allegations of misconduct can sometimes feel like reading a spy novel about science. And we’ve read a lot of them. In a recent post that drew from one such report, we wrote: Whenever we learn about misconduct cases at public universities, we file such … Continue reading Reports of misconduct investigations can tell us a lot. Here are more than a dozen of them.
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured a critic with more than two dozen retractions; why twenty … Continue reading Weekend reads: The fall of a Crossfit science watchdog; a CDC retraction about suicides; “superb subterfuge” by predatory journals
Yes, you read that headline right. In a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the … Continue reading 35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring, says new paper
In September 2014, an investigation into the work of an award-winning cancer researcher in Illinois concluded that multiple papers had been affected by misconduct. Now, nearly four years later, two of those articles have been retracted. What happened in the intervening years reveals a complicated and at times bizarre story involving not only scientific misconduct, … Continue reading He was once a prominent cancer researcher. Then his gambling — and a finding of scientific misconduct — got in the way.
A probe into the work of a researcher who studied natural products for cancer had many stops and starts along the way — including five extensions granted by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity — according to documents obtained by Retraction Watch. Following a public records request, we recently obtained a copy of the report … Continue reading A misconduct probe — which led to 20 retraction requests — took four years. Why?
Over the years, we have written about a number of the sleuths who, on their own time and often at great risks to their careers or finances, have looked for issues in the scientific literature. Here’s a sampling: