This week at Retraction Watch featured a look at the nuances of replication efforts, aka “the replication paradox,” as well as yet another story of fake peer reviews, this time at Hindawi. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: California universities battle in court for research dollars; fake conferences; fake impact factors
High-profile biologist is suspended after two investigations found he “breached his duty of care”, committed “misconduct”
High-profile plant biologist Olivier Voinnet has been suspended for two years from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) following the results of two investigations that revealed a number of issues in his publication record.
An investigation at ETH Zurich found that the scientist “breached his duty of care in the handling of figures as well as in his supervisory duties as a research director.”
Another investigation at CNRS, where Voinnet also works as a researcher, also found “the existence of deliberate chart/diagram manipulations” — while not “fabrication,” these breaches “amount to scientific misconduct,” according to a press release about the report.
The ETH committee uncovered multiple errors, from the “mere confusion of correct and incorrect figures” to “the ‘beautification’ of figures,” but said that it was not scientific misconduct, according to ETH guidelines:
Ethics dispute forces retraction of paper on Hep C in Japanese leper colony
Here’s a case of retraction being a hammer when a scalpel might have been better.
The authors of a 2011 paper in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology looking at transmission of hepatitis C in a former leper colony in Japan have retracted the article because an ethics panel in that country objected to the scientists’ use of fetal tissue.
The article involves a controversial aspect of modern Japanese history — the country’s efforts to eradicate leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, by isolating patients in a string of state-run sanatoriums. The policy was eventually realized to be unnecessary and ruled unconstitutional in 2001, triggering a wave of apologies to patients and their families.
Continue reading Ethics dispute forces retraction of paper on Hep C in Japanese leper colony
Two crystallography papers break apart for “trivial errors,” says author
Biophysicists in India have retracted two crystallography papers describing protein binding sites following “concerns,” according to one retraction note.
The last author on both papers, however, told us he believed the retractions were the result of “trivial errors.” Although one journal praised him in its retraction note for his “positive engagement,” he said the process left him feeling “disgusted.”
One paper, “Structural Studies on Molecular Interactions between Camel Peptidoglycan Recognition Protein, CPGRP-S, and Peptidoglycan Moieties N-Acetylglucosamine and N-Acetylmuramic Acid,” was withdrawn from the Journal of Biological Chemistry in August 2014.
The second, “Mode of binding of the antithyroid drug propylthiouracil to mammalian haem peroxidases,” was retracted from Acta Crystallographica Section F this month. Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Two crystallography papers break apart for “trivial errors,” says author
Psych journal axes study of child molesters
A journal has issued a “notice of redundant publication” for a paper that used virtual reality to understand arousal patterns in child molesters — the result of “an unfortunate sequence of personal events relating to the first author.”
The study, “Using immersive virtual reality and ecological psychology to probe into child molesters’ phenomenology,” was originally published online in 2011 and printed in 2013.
The Journal of Sexual Aggression announced the “notice of redundant publication” after the editors discovered the article contained “content of which much was included in an article published between the first online publication date of the original article and the final publication”. The article shares many of the same co-authors, and has since been retracted.
Patrice Renaud, the first author and a lecturer at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, took responsibility for the additional publications. In an email to Retraction Watch, Renaud said that the issues arose because of a family medical emergency:
Continue reading Psych journal axes study of child molesters
New York Times says it “would not have assigned” elephant article to writer had they known of conflict
Although we nearly always stick to covering the scientific literature, we sometimes write about cases in other media that shed light on how different outlets correct the record. This is one of those times.
The New York Times issued an editor’s note and correction last week to a June 26 article about Happy the elephant, who some argue is suffering because she lives isolated from the other elephants at the Bronx Zoo.
After publication, however, the paper made a major discovery about the writer of the piece, Tracy Tullis: She had signed an online petition to move Happy to an elephant sanctuary. As they write in the editor’s note: Continue reading New York Times says it “would not have assigned” elephant article to writer had they known of conflict
Journal quarantines MERS paper, posts EoC for “rights to use the data”
Eurosurveillance is investigating potential problems with study on the deadly breakout of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in South Korea. The notice was issued after the journal discovered that study data might have been used without permission.
“Epidemiological investigation of MERS-CoV spread in a single hospital in South Korea, May to June 2015,” was published last month by a group of researchers at the Gyeonggi Infectious Disease Control Center in Korea, and details 37 cases of people at one hospital, one portion of the nearly 200 who’ve developed the new respiratory infection since the outbreak began. The researchers tracked the path of infection from one initial patient to 25 secondary cases, who then infected 11 additional people. As the researchers note:
Continue reading Journal quarantines MERS paper, posts EoC for “rights to use the data”
30+ papers flagged because editors may have “subverted the peer review process” with fake accounts
In what has become a familiar story, another publisher has found more than 30 papers that appear to have been accepted and published based on fake peer reviews.
Hindawi, publisher of more than 400 journals, is having 32 papers re-reviewed after an investigation
…identified three Editors who appear to have subverted the peer review process by creating fraudulent reviewer accounts and using these accounts to submit favorable review reports.
The publisher launched its investigation following BioMed Central’s November announcement that they had found at least 50 papers accepted because of fake reviews. That announcement came days after we published a feature in Nature on the phenomenon. BMC eventually retracted 43 articles.
As Hindawi notes in a statement posted to its site today: Continue reading 30+ papers flagged because editors may have “subverted the peer review process” with fake accounts
Recursive recursiveness: Retracted Lewandowsky et al conspiracy ideation study republished
A paper on “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” whose puzzling publication (and retraction) history formed the basis of a series of Retraction Watch posts in 2013 and 2014 is back, as part of a new article in a different journal.
Retraction Watch readers may recall a paper published in 2013 in Frontiers in Psychology. That paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” was an attempt by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues to describe the reactions to another controversial Psychological Science paper Lewandowsky had co-authored, “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.”
The reason we started writing about the Frontiers paper was that it was removed from the journal’s site in March of 2013, for unclear reasons, before being formally retracted a year later with a reference to an investigation that “did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study” but found that “the legal context is insufficiently clear.” Continue reading Recursive recursiveness: Retracted Lewandowsky et al conspiracy ideation study republished
JAMA issues mega-correction for data breach letter due to “wording and data errors”
A JAMA letter published in April on data breaches accidentally included some data that shouldn’t have been published, either — specifically, “wording and data errors” that affected five sentences and more than 10 entries in a table. One result — a reported increase in breaches over time — also went from statistically significant to “borderline” significant, according to the first author. (So yeah, this post earns our “mega correction” category.)
According to an author, an “older version” of a table made it into the letter, “Data Breaches of Protected Health Information in the United States,” which was corrected in the journal’s June 23/30 issue.
The letter and table in question detail 949 breaches of “unencrypted protected health information.” The letter says the number of breaches has increased from 2010 to 2013; the original article claimed that the P value on that increase was <.001, but the correction says it’s really 0.07. The original says 29.1 million personal records were affected in those breaches; the real number is 29.0. And so on.
Continue reading JAMA issues mega-correction for data breach letter due to “wording and data errors”