The European Ophthalmic Review has retracted a 2014 article about the macular degeneration drug aflibercept without any explanation.
Here’s the retraction notice, such as it is:
Continue reading We’ll tell you later, says ophthalmology journal about retracted paper
Scientists have discovered the skull of a new dinosaur, a feathered relative of the Triceratops, according to new findings released in Current Biology today.
Now, we know what you may be thinking – we don’t normally cover science news. We’re writing about this paper because of a little note we saw in the acknowledgements:
Cell Press is looking into anonymous allegations that a pair of influential papers on gene activation in yeast may contain more than two dozen instances of image manipulation, according to a spokesperson for the journal.
The accusations first appeared in March on PubPeer, where they triggered a small avalanche of comments, including one asserting “unambiguous and repeated examples of data re-use.”
The concerns raised on PubPeer have even sparked an investigation by an institution in Spain, which found no evidence to support the allegations. But not everyone agrees with that verdict.
The editor of the Journal of Environmental Health Science and Engineering has retracted a paper mapping flood zones in Iran because the authors mistakenly uploaded a manuscript that had already been published elsewhere.
According to corresponding author Majid Bagheri of K.N. Toosi University of Technology in Tehran, a different paper on wastewater treatment was accepted and peer-reviewed at JEHSE, but then the authors uploaded the wrong manuscript, and that manuscript, on flood zones, made it all the way through acceptance and publication due to an “oversight.”
The retracted version of the paper was published online on December 27, 2014 in JEHSE, a BioMed Central title. The preceding, non-retracted version, was published online at the Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering just four days earlier, on December 23, 2014.
Here is Bagheri’s account: Continue reading Flood paper washed away after “oversight” leads to publication of wrong manuscript
A new group of experts is suggesting there’s something fishy in the body of work of social psychologist Jens Förster.
The University of Amsterdam, Förster’s former employer, commissioned three statistical experts to examine his publication record, looking for signs that the data are not authentic.
Well, they found some signs:
The publishers of the journal Petroleum Science and Technology have retracted a paper because one of the authors “did not agree to co-author this manuscript,” and did not even communicate with the other three authors.
According to one involved party, the problem is bigger than just lack of communication: The paper, “Fatigue and Low Temperature Fracture in Bitumen Mastic,” authored by a dean of civil engineering in Iran, was “copied word for word” from a Canadian student’s master thesis, according to the student’s advisor.
Three of the authors on the paper are engineers at the Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University in Tehran, Iran, including the dean of civil engineering, Saeed Ghaffarpour Jahromi. The fourth author, B. J. Smith, is listed as a member of the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Continue reading Asphalt paper paved over for allegedly plagiarizing a student’s thesis
Three biologists at Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan have retracted a 2014 Frontiers in Plant Science paper on abnormal root growth in Arabidopsis “in light of new experimental evidence” showing they fingered the wrong mutant gene. The journal editors are hailing the retraction as an “excellent example of self-correction of the scientific record.”
The paper, “Mechanosensitive channel candidate MCA2 is involved in touch-induced root responses in Arabidopsis,” described the abnormally behaving roots of a mca2-null mutant Arabidopsis plant.
A subsequent string of experiments by the same research team—including DNA microarrays, RT-PCR, and a PCR-based genomic deletion analysis—demonstrated that two other mutations that somehow creeped into their experimental populations may have been to blame for the abnormal root behavior.
It’s a notably thorough and informative retraction notice from Frontiers, an open-access publisher with a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions. The notice describes the new experiments and the previous, erroneous results: Continue reading “[T]hese things can happen in every lab:” Mutant plant paper uprooted after authors correct their own findings
The New York Times has an editorial today with which we wholeheartedly agree: The newspaper is calling on scientists — and even the government — to pay more attention to misconduct in research. (It also doesn’t hurt that the paper mentions us.)
The proximate cause of the editorial, titled “Scientists Who Cheat,” is the retraction by Science of the gay marriage study by Michael LaCour, which we — and the Times, among others — have covered extensively.
As the editorial rightly notes, the pressures to publish are pushing some researchers to make up data. (Monday’s paper also carries a page 1 article about the dangers of splashy science that’s worth reading.) Continue reading New York Times pushes for more focus, funding on research misconduct
The careers site of Science magazine has pulled an advice column posted today from virologist Alice Huang, who suggested a postdoc tolerate an advisor’s roving eye.
In the retraction note, Science Careers apologizes for publishing the post, even if it was for just a few hours. “We regret that the article had not undergone proper editorial review prior to posting.”
Luckily, we found a web archive, courtesy of Kelly Hills (@rocza).
Here’s the question, from a reader whom we presume to be female:
Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems, an Elsevier publication, has retracted a 2014 paper by researchers in China and the United Kingdom for data misuse and authorship issues.
The article, “Optimization of fluidized bed spray granulation process based on a multiphase hybrid model,” was purportedly written by Dapeng Niu, of the College of Information Science and Engineering at Northeastern University, in Shenyang, China, Ming Li, of De Montfort University, in Leicester, England, and Fuli Wang, a vice-president at Northeastern.
But Niu apparently didn’t perform any experiments, lifted the data from other sources, and published the paper without his co-authors’ okay.
Here’s more from the retraction notice: Continue reading Sub-optimal: Industrial optimization paper crushed by author’s “serious error of judgment”