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”
West Virginia University biologists have retracted two papers on insecticides for fruit pests due to a confidentiality agreement with a chemical manufacturer stating that the “results should not be published.”
The retracted 2014 articles in Arthropod Management Tests, “Control of Internal Lepidoptera and other insect pests in apple, 2013” and “Control of Oriental Fruit Moth and other insect pests in peach, 2013,” were written by WVU entomologist Daniel Frank and plant pathologist Alan Biggs.
We’ve been unable to find abstracts for the papers, but here is a sister paper Frank and Biggs published in 2012,“Control of Internal Lepidoptera and other insect pests in apple, 2012,” evaluating various insecticides for the control of internal lepidoptera on an experimental plot of Red Delicious apple trees in West Virginia.
Here’s the to-the-point retraction note, which is identical for each paper: Continue reading The “results should not be published:” Company confidentiality agreement squashes two insecticide papers
As might have been expected, continuing developments in the Michael LaCour gay canvassing study retraction have drowned out coverage of stories that ordinarily might capture a lot of attention, such as fake case reports making their way into CDC data. A sampling:
But just like last week, there was plenty happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Gay canvassing study saga continues; Elsevier policy sparks concern; a string of scandals
As promised, Michael LaCour, the co-author of the now-retracted Science paper on gay canvassing, has posted a detailed response to the allegations against him.
In the 23-page document — available here — LaCour claims to
introduce evidence uncovering discrepancies between the timeline of events presented in Broockman et al. (2015) and the actual timeline of events and disclosure.
He also says that the graduate students who critiqued his work failed to follow the correct sampling procedure and chose an incorrect variable in what LaCour calls “a curious and possibly intentional ‘error.'” He writes: Continue reading Data “were destroyed due to privacy/confidentiality requirements,” says co-author of retracted gay canvassing study
A former employee in the public health division of the Oregon Health Authority committed misconduct in 56 case reports about Clostridium difficile infections in Klamath County, Oregon, as well as in a manuscript submitted to JAMA Internal Medicine and a published report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in March, 2012.
Ryan Asherin, previously a Surveillance Officer and Principal Investigator at the OHA, was a busy man. According to the details from a report by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, Asherin:
Continue reading Oregon public health employee faked 56 infection case reports: ORI