The story about Olivier Voinnet, a high-profile plant biologist whose work has fallen under scrutiny, continues to build momentum. Late last week, Voinnet’s employer and one of his funders announced they were investigating his work, and one of the peer reviewers of a soon-to-be-retracted paper has made her original report public.
Here’s the statement from CNRS, which funds Voinnet: Continue reading Investigations into Voinnet’s work announced; critic publishes original peer review
Reading is hard and takes a long time, so it’s nice that the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan didn’t give us too much work to do with this 12 word retraction.
Journal ISIJ International minced no words about why the 2014 paper on steel manufacturing was withdrawn, because there were no words. Here’s the notice for “Microstructure and Properties of Fiber Laser Welded Joints of Ultrahigh-strength Steel 22MnB5 and its Dissimilar Combination with Q235 Steel” in its entirety – half the length of the title!: Continue reading Retraction notice for steel manufacturing paper leaves much to the imagination
An attorney for Fazlul Sarkar, the Wayne State University researcher who claims he lost a job offer because of comments about his research on PubPeer, has asked a judge to reconsider last month’s decision not to release information about the site’s anonymous commenters. As a consequence, the brief in support of that motion identifies a key commenter as the pseudonymous Clare Francis.
On March 19, a Michigan court ruled that PubPeer had to disclose identifying information about a single commenter, who left the second of these comments: Continue reading Lawsuit involving PubPeer unmasks commenter as pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis
This week at Retraction Watch featured two Office of Research Integrity findings, and retractions in the Voinnet and Hanna cases. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Yelp for journals; where do the postdocs go?; scientific papers’ hidden jokes
A paper on wiretapping in the Arab region has been retracted by a Qatari law review journal for redundant publication and “possible misuse of plagiarism detection software at the authoring stage.”
The 2013 article in the International Review of Law discusses how different Arab countries regulate intercepting telecommunications, and how to balance public safety with the right to privacy. According to the notice, it ripped off two other articles by author Nazzal Kisswani, published in 2011 and 2010. “Although it is not an exact copy of a previously published article, it contains parts of it,” the retraction explains.
Here’s the notice for “The “Right to Privacy” v. telecommunications interception and access: International regulations and implementations in the Arab Region”: Continue reading “Identical in theory and concept”: Privacy paper pulled over redundancy
Karel Bezouška, the Czech biochemist who was caught on hidden camera breaking into a lab fridge to fake results, has turned it up to eleven with two new retractions.
Both retractions appeared in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, one in October 2014 and one in January 2015. His story began two decades ago in 1994, when he published a paper in Nature that couldn’t be reproduced, and was eventually retracted in 2013.
The best part of the story, of course, is that when his university was attempting to recreate his experiments, Bezouška broke into a lab fridge to tamper with the experiments. Unbeknownst to him, he was caught on hidden camera. Continue reading Two more retractions bring lab break-in biochemist up to eleven
Onward State, an alternative student news website for Penn State University, has pulled an article about a student psychic for promoting “one of the most fraudulent, predatory practices around.”
The psychic has been given her own reality TV show on ABC Family (an oxymoron if ever there was one). The newspaper had reported the news of the show with, shall we say, something of a credulous eye. Per the item: Continue reading Unhappy medium: Penn State website retracts article touting student psychic
A 2002 paper has been retracted by Cancer after some of the authors notified the journal that they hadn’t agreed to submit it — and an investigation found that a number of the patients described had been made up.
Here’s the notice for “Radioimmunotherapy of small-volume disease of metastatic colorectal cancer: results of a phase II trial with the iodine-131–labeled humanized anti–carcinoembryonic antigen antibody hMN-14:” Continue reading Study by deceased award-winning cancer researcher retracted because some patients were “invented”
It turns out a 2014 paper that found a surprising pattern of plant migration in response to global warming was not so surprising after all — it’s been retracted by the authors due to a mistake in the statistical analysis.
Most studies on migrating populations have found that species around the globe move north to escape the rising temperatures. But the authors of the 2014 paper in Global Change Biology found the opposite — according to their analysis, many plant species in Western North America had been migrating south, toward warmer climates.
The lead author Melanie Harsch told Science in 2014 that the team had been suspicious of the analysis, and so ran it twice: Continue reading Stats error has chilling effect on global warming paper
How should scientists think about papers that have undergone what appears to be a cursory peer review? Perhaps the papers were reviewed in a day — or less — or simply green-lighted by an editor, without an outside look. That’s a question Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford University autism researcher, asked herself when she noticed some troubling trends in four autism journals.
Recently, Bishop sparked a firestorm when she wrote several blog posts arguing that these four autism journals had a serious problem. For instance, she found that Johnny Matson, then-editor of Research in Developmental Disabilities and Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, had an unusually high rate of citing his own research – 55% of his citations are to his own papers, according to Bishop. Matson also published a lot in his own journals – 10% of the papers published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders since Matson took over in 2007 have been his. Matson’s prodigious self-citation in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders was initially pointed out by autism researcher Michelle Dawson, as noted in Bishop’s original post.
Short peer reviews of a day or less were also common. Matson no longer edits the journals, both published by Elsevier.
Bishop noted similar findings at Developmental Neurorehabilitation and Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, where the editors (and Matson) frequently published in each others’ journals, and they often had short peer reviews: The median time for Matson’s papers in Developmental Neurorehabilitation between 2010 and 2014 was a day, and many were accepted the day they were submitted, says Bishop.
Although this behavior may seem suspect, it wasn’t necessarily against the journals’ editorial policies. This is the peer review policy at RIDD:
Continue reading Poll: What to do when peer review feels inadequate?