Professor defends ripping off his student by insulting him in the media

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Shahid Azam

University of Regina professor Shahid Azam is the kind of thesis advisor that gives prospective grad students nightmares.

According to the CBC, Azam lost a paper in Environmental Geotechnics for plagiarizing the work of his student, Arjun Paul, without bothering to cite it. Azam went on to trash the student’s ability to the CBC reporter.

He’s got two excuses, but we’re not sure which is more repugnant – that he wrote much of his student’s thesis for him and so deserves to steal it, or that plagiarism is standard practice in engineering publishing.

From the CBC: Continue reading Professor defends ripping off his student by insulting him in the media

Publisher sets high bar: Only articles “with lowest plagiarism” will be accepted

jipbsMaybe you can be a little bit pregnant after all.

At least, that’s what the editors of the Journal of Innovations in Pharmaceutical and Biological Sciences would have submitters believe.

In a rather ham-handed invitation to authors received by a friend of Retraction Watch, the open-access journal “cordially” solicits papers with a helpful illustrated timeline (our comments in parentheses): Continue reading Publisher sets high bar: Only articles “with lowest plagiarism” will be accepted

Lancet journal puts ICU paper on watch after authors acknowledge potentially fatal flaw

lancetrmLancet Respiratory Medicine has issued an expression of concern for a meta-analysis on tracheostomy in the intensive care unit that they published earlier this year.

The paper, “Effect of early versus late or no tracheostomy on mortality of critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation: a systematic review and meta-analysis“, came from a group at Harvard, Weill Cornell and the University of Athens. The authors purported to find that: Continue reading Lancet journal puts ICU paper on watch after authors acknowledge potentially fatal flaw

“Significant” copying forces retraction of sternotomy paper

icatsInteractive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery has yanked a 2005 sternotomy paper by a group of researchers who plagiarized from an earlier article on the subject.

The article, “The complications of repeat median sternotomy in paediatrics: six-months follow-up of consecutive cases,” came from a team at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England, and has been cited eight times, according to Scopus.

Here’s the notice:

Continue reading “Significant” copying forces retraction of sternotomy paper

“Know how to recognize pseudoscience:” Reader reveals how fish oil paper came to be retracted

Ian Garber
Ian Garber

After our post yesterday on a fishy retraction from author Brian Peskin, a reader who alerted the journal to problems got in touch to give us the lowdown.

Ian Garber is in the last year of medical residency at the University of British Columbia. Here’s the story he told us via email: Continue reading “Know how to recognize pseudoscience:” Reader reveals how fish oil paper came to be retracted

Overly honest references: “Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?”

ethologyWe never cease to be amazed what can make it through peer review and several levels of editing.

In this case, some fish mating researchers wrote an, um, love note to their peers that failed to be edited out by any of the many eyes who must have at least glanced over it.

Here’s our favorite passage in “Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments” (emphasis ours), published in Ethology:

Continue reading Overly honest references: “Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?”

PubPeer Selections: Corrections in PNAS, PLOS Pathogens after PubPeer critiques; how old is too old?

pubpeerHere’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: Corrections in PNAS, PLOS Pathogens after PubPeer critiques; how old is too old?

“Undeclared competing interest” sinks fish oil takedown by author fined for deceptive claims

Snake swallowing a whole fish
Image via Jesse Palmer

The Journal of Lipids has retracted an aggressively negative review article called “Why Fish Oil Fails,” written by one Brian S. Peskin, whose bogus health claims have landed him in plenty of hot water in the past.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading “Undeclared competing interest” sinks fish oil takedown by author fined for deceptive claims

It’s happened again: Journal “cannot rule out” possibility author did his own peer review

ijkcThomson Reuters’ online peer review system ScholarOne is having quite a year.

This summer, a scientist exploited basic security flaws in how the system accepts author suggestions for peer reviewers to review a whole pile of his own manuscripts, ultimately resulting in the retraction of 60 papers and the resignation of the Taiwan minister of education.

Now, another journal that uses the system, Wiley’s International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, has retracted a paper because the authors provided their own peer reviewers and “the identity of the peer reviewers could subsequently not be verified.”

We asked editor Craig A. Taatjes if he was concerned the authors had conducted their own peer review. His response is reflective of many of the breaches we’ve seen so far for these online systems: Continue reading It’s happened again: Journal “cannot rule out” possibility author did his own peer review

“I kind of like that about science:” Harvard diabetes breakthrough muddied by two new papers

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Doug Melton

Harvard stem cell researcher Doug Melton got a lot of press last year for research on a hormone he named betatrophin, after its supposed ability to increase production of beta cells, which regulate insulin.

Now, the conclusions from that paper, which has been cited 59 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, have been called into question by research from an independent group, as well as follow-up work from the original team.

The interest was driven by the hormone’s potential as a new treatment for diabetes. In 2013, Melton told the Harvard Gazette that betatrophin could be in clinical trials within three to five years. Here’s Kerry Grens in The Scientist: Continue reading “I kind of like that about science:” Harvard diabetes breakthrough muddied by two new papers