Dead men tell no tales – nor respond to journal’s formatting queries

mamasIn November 2014, Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures withdrew an online-first publication on the grounds that, over the previous two years, the corresponding author has not responded to questions regarding formatting.

There is, apparently, a good reason for that, although the notice for “Analysis of Effective Properties of Three-phase Electro-magneto-elastic Solids” suggests the editors of the journal are unaware of it:

Continue reading Dead men tell no tales – nor respond to journal’s formatting queries

Exclusive: Former NIH lab head who faked data now working as government patent examiner

usptoThe former director  of the X-ray crystallography lab at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity to have faked findings in three papers, is once again earning a government salary, this time as a patent examiner, Retraction Watch has learned. Continue reading Exclusive: Former NIH lab head who faked data now working as government patent examiner

New favorite plagiarism euphemism: “Inadvertently copied text”

biodata miningPlagiarism earned genomics researchers an erratum, not a retraction, in BioMed Central journal BioData Mining.

We keep a list of best euphemisms for plagiarism, and this one is right up there.

Here’s the notice for “An iteration normalization and test method for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data”: Continue reading New favorite plagiarism euphemism: “Inadvertently copied text”

Far from earth-shatteringly new: Plagiarism topples Chinese quake paper

scientificreportsA group of scientists at the Chinese Earthquake Administration in Beijing have lost their 2014 paper in Nature Scientific Reports for lifting chunks of text from a previously published article.

The abstract of the paper, “Early magnitude estimation for the MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake using progressively expanded P-wave time window,” states: Continue reading Far from earth-shatteringly new: Plagiarism topples Chinese quake paper

Weekend reads: Potti trial to begin; fraudster post-doc fired; how to avoid predatory journals

booksThis week at Retraction Watch featured a hotly debated guest post from Leonid Schneider and two ORI findings. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Potti trial to begin; fraudster post-doc fired; how to avoid predatory journals

“Immorally” affecting the literature: Authors blame sloppy work from an outside lab for retraction

SpandidosA group of Chinese researchers has retracted a paper, saying that an outside lab switched their immunofluorescent stains with another research group’s.

The group has decided to repeat the experiments on their own next time.

Here’s the notice in Molecular Medicine Reports for “Protective role of Klotho on cardiomyocytes upon hypoxia/reoxygenation via downregulation of Akt and FOXO1 phosphorylation”: Continue reading “Immorally” affecting the literature: Authors blame sloppy work from an outside lab for retraction

Former Pitt cancer researcher admits to faking findings

Dong Xiao
Dong Xiao

A former researcher at the University of Pittsburgh inflated the number of mice used in his experiments, and faked data in a number of images in a paper reporting the results, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Dong Xiao admitting to having

intentionally fabricated data contained in a paper entitled ‘Guggulsterone inhibits prostate cancer growth via inactivation of Akt regulated by ATP citrate signaling,’ specifically Figure 6G,

the ORI reports. The paper was published in  in July 2014 in Oncotarget. Here’s Figure 6: Continue reading Former Pitt cancer researcher admits to faking findings

PubPeer Selections: Good behavior earns praise; questions about HIV vaccine research

pubpeerPubPeer continues to make its mark on the scientific literature. Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: Good behavior earns praise; questions about HIV vaccine research

Cut and paste and a PC crash: figure manipulations sink two papers

jnc

Two papers by an overlapping group of researchers in Italy have been retracted for manipulated figures.

In late 2013, perennial tipster Clare Francis sent their concerns about several papers, including the two that have been retracted, by authors who frequently publish together. One of the papers, in the Journal of Neurochemistry, is from a team led by Ferdinando Nicoletti; four other papers from the group have been criticized on PubPeer for image manipulation, which he addressed via email with us.

The second retracted paper, from the Journal of Immunology, has shares one author with the first: Patrizia Di Iorio of the University of Chieti, though according to Nicoletti she had no role in preparing the figures.

Here’s the April 2014 notice for “Neuroprotection mediated by glial group-II metabotropic glutamate receptors requires the activation of the MAP kinase and the phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase pathways” in the Journal of Neurochemistry. It’s behind a paywall, but the journal has assured us this is against policy and they will be fixing it shortly:
Continue reading Cut and paste and a PC crash: figure manipulations sink two papers

Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.

PNAS jan15Back in November 2013, we wrote about a correction in PNAS about a May 2012 paper by a group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York who, as we said at the time

had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher — what we might call plagiarism, in a less charitable mood.

Continue reading Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.