What happens to researchers who publish duplicated papers? At one university, they’re promoted

One of the things we try to do here at Retraction Watch is see what happens to researchers who’ve had to retract papers. There’s Naoki Mori, who lost his job because of extensive image manipulation but sued successfully to get it back, for example. Now, courtesy of the Oakland Press, we have the story of … Continue reading What happens to researchers who publish duplicated papers? At one university, they’re promoted

Leading immunologist retracts paper that duplicated 2004 PNAS study

University of Glasgow professor Foo Yew “Eddy” Liew, a Fellow of the Royal Society, has retracted a paper in Cellular Immunology because it duplicated one of his earlier papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here’s the notice for “Expression and function of Toll-like receptor on T cells:”

JCI paper retracted for duplicated panels after authors can’t provide original data

So how long do researchers have to keep records of experiments? We had that question while reading the retraction notice for a 2007 paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation:

Image problems lead to demise of paper on ginseng for heart attack

A group of researchers from Shangdong, China, has retracted their 2011 paper in the Journal of Molecular Medicine on the heart-protective properties of a substance in ginseng because the article contained dodgy figures. The article, “Ginsenoside-Rg1 enhances angiogenesis and ameliorates ventricular remodeling in a rat model of myocardial infarction,” purported to show that ginsenoside:

Retraction count for gynecologic cancer researcher Takai grows to seven

Noriyuki Takai, a gynecologic cancer researcher at Oita University in Japan who retracted three papers last October, has four more retractions, these in Cancer Letters. All but one of the notices reads as follows:

“Way out there” paper claiming to merge physics and biology retracted

A German professor who claims to have developed “a self-consistent field theory which is used to derive at all known interactions of the potential vortex” will have at least two papers retracted, thanks to the scrutiny of a concerned economist. The first retraction has already appeared, in DNA and Cell Biology, for a paper by … Continue reading “Way out there” paper claiming to merge physics and biology retracted

How to report allegations of scientific misconduct

Given the subject of Retraction Watch, readers often email us with papers they’d like us to look into, whether for alleged image manipulation, potential plagiarism or duplication, or other issues. As we explain in question five of our FAQ, we don’t have the resources to do such investigations, unfortunately; we can’t even keep up with … Continue reading How to report allegations of scientific misconduct

Publisher wants $650 to retract duplicated study

We’ve heard about a lot of barriers to retraction — author and editor stubbornness being the most frequent. But now there’s a new one: A publisher that wants to charge authors $650 to retract. University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall — who produces a frequently updated list of predatory publishers — first wrote about the … Continue reading Publisher wants $650 to retract duplicated study

Serbian scientists decry systematic plagiarism, predatory publishing

An open letter to the Serbian science ministry – coinciding with the new government’s first 100 days in office – and an accompanying petition signed by 850 scientists so far, makes for pretty dim reading on the state of research ethics in Serbia. The systematic and apparently state-endorsed practice of artificially boosting one’s ratings in … Continue reading Serbian scientists decry systematic plagiarism, predatory publishing

Image correction in Current Biology for Harvard’s Sam Lee

The work of Sam W. Lee, a cancer biologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, has come under fire at Science Fraud lately over concerns about the possible reuse of images in his group’s published studies. Turns out there’s some there, there after all. The journal Current Biology has issued a pretty thorny correction for … Continue reading Image correction in Current Biology for Harvard’s Sam Lee