Back 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.
Over the past few months, there has been a great deal of criticism of the work of stem cell researcher Jacob Hanna, especially on PubPeer.
Now, Hanna has responded in the comments of the PubPeer entries for a number of papers. He has also posted a number of PDFs, including his PhD thesis, and correspondence with scientists who have been critical of his work.
He also wrote a response to a criticism published on bioRxIV, a non-peer reviewed repository of biology pre-prints.
One of Hanna’s comments on PubPeer is a summary of the issues with his Blood paper on PubPeer, blaming the figure errors on “medical trainees” who did the word while he was away at Mount Sinai. Here’s his explanation: Continue reading Stem cell researcher Jacob Hanna responds to criticism
A retracted 2008 paper originally flagged by Clare Francis has been republished in Environmental Health Perspectives with updated figures and new data.
According to the editor’s note appended to the newly published paper, there was no evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the authors. The new paper went through peer review as an entirely new submission, and comes to the same conclusion as the original: Continue reading Retracted paper on herbicide-ovarian cancer connection republished
A team led by David Latchman, a geneticist and administrator at University College London, has notched a mysterious retraction in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and has had 25 more papers questioned on PubPeer.
The JBC notice for “Antiapoptotic activity of the free caspase recruitment domain of procaspase-9: A novel endogenous rescue pathway in cell death” is as useless as they come, a regular occurrence for the journal: Continue reading Prominent geneticist nets retraction, two corrections, and a lot of questions
We’re pleased to share this guest post from Leonid Schneider, a cell biologist, science journalist and a prolific cartoonist whose work graces our Twitter profile and Facebook page. In it, Schneider argues for a new way to ensure accountability for publicly funded research.
It has become clear that scientific dishonesty is rarely sanctioned. In the worst case scenario, manipulated or fraudulent papers have to be retracted, yet scientists of a certain academic standing can weather retractions without much adverse effect on their careers or institutional budgets. Retraction Watch lists plenty of cases in which the full blame for retracted papers has been accepted by the first author, with the senior principal investigator (PI) continuing as nothing has happened. Cases of justice, like that of the HIV-vaccine fraudster Dong-Pyou Han, who has apparently accepted a plea bargain after losing his job at Iowa State University, which in turn had to forfeit part of a $14.5 million NIH grant to the lab in which he worked, are very rare.
The problem is that Continue reading What if universities had to agree to refund grants whenever there was a retraction?
Hindawi journal PPAR Research has pulled a cancer immunology paper after discovering it contained almost no new information.
Instead, it was a Frankenstein-style stitch job, containing sentences ripped from 33 different papers. 18 of those ended up in the citations; for 15 more, the authors didn’t even do them that courtesy. You can see a meticulously color-coded call out here.
Here’s the notice for “A Role for PPARy in the Regulation of Cytokines in Immune Cells and Cancer”: Continue reading Franken-paper from U.S. federal contractor heads to the grave
A postdoc at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation faked data in a submitted paper and in a grant application, according to a new report from the Office of Research Integrity.
Bin Kang admitted to the misconduct, in which he Continue reading Oklahoma postdoc admits to faking data in grant application, submitted paper
This week at Retraction Watch witnessed the fall of a “golden boy” and a “NASA Patriot Boy.” Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Vaccine research fraudster to plead guilty; nonsense authors publish another paper
Tyndale House says it will be recalling copies of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven after the boy in question, Alex Malarkey (yes, that’s really his name), said he didn’t make the trip after all.
Malarkey made the claim after having been injured in a car accident when he was 6. The book became a best-seller for Tyndale, which, according to NPR, called it Continue reading Heaven still waiting: Publisher pulls book after boy recants on visit to heaven
A pair of cell biologists have taken responsibility for extensive figure errors that scuttled their paper in the Journal of Cell Biology.
While there were five authors, first and last authors Eva Szabo and Michal Opas took responsibility in the notice. A number of figures “contain incorrect data and/or presentation errors,” and the original data isn’t available for verification. The notice is unusually clear about which figures and data are compromised.
The paper was published in 2008, and retracted on January 12, 2015. It has been cited 32 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice for “Calreticulin inhibits commitment to adipocyte differentiation’: Continue reading Fat cell paper earns unusually detailed retraction