A former postdoc at Johns Hopkins University has been hit by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) with a four-year ban on receiving federal research funding after being found guilty of misconduct in several studies and her doctoral dissertation. We covered problems with several of Deepti Malhotra’s papers in February of 2016. At the … Continue reading Former Johns Hopkins postdoc sanctioned by Feds for data fabrication
A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist. As its title would indicate, the article, “Anti-angiogenic effect of Interleukin-26 in oxygen-induced retinopathy mice via inhibiting NFATc1-VEGF pathway,” by a team from Jinhua Municipal … Continue reading ‘The problem is that there is no IL-26 gene in the mouse’ — an exasperated letter leads to a retraction
As we’ve noted before, “the wheels of scientific publishing turn slowly … but they do (sometimes) turn.” More than six years after the first retraction for Erin Potts-Kant, who was part of a group at Duke whose work would unravel amid misconduct allegations and lead to a $112.5 million settlement earlier this year with the … Continue reading “Highly unusual and unfortunate error” delays retraction two years in high-profile Duke case
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a request: Our co-founder Ivan Oransky is celebrating a birthday this coming week, and he’d like nothing more than a gift to Retraction Watch to support our work. Here’s your chance. The week at Retraction Watch featured a psychology researcher who did the right thing; 15 retractions by … Continue reading Weekend reads: A week of whistleblower news, including what happens when one gets it wrong; questions about a widely covered study of men with guitar bags
A gastroenterology journal has issued an extensive expression of concern about a 2013 paper by Yoshihiro Sato, a Japanese endocrinologist who has posthumously been climbing the Retraction Watch leaderboard. (He’s now ranked number three, ahead of Diederik Stapel.) To call the statement an “expression of concern” is like calling Charles M. Schulz a talented cartoonist, … Continue reading Journal expresses a great deal of concern over deceased author’s work
Evidently meth is a gateway drug … for publishing misconduct. Researchers in China have lost a 2019 paper on how LSD can damage eyesight because they’d lifted much of the paper from an article that had appeared the year before in a different journal — about methamphetamine. The retracted article, “Long-term systemic treatment with lysergic … Continue reading Drug researchers trip up, lifting meth paper to write one on LSD
The ancients had a thing for hybrids (think animals, not cars): half goat-half humans, horses with human torsos, winged horses and lions, you get the picture. But a chicken-cow mix wasn’t on that list … until now. A group of researchers in Brazil has lost a paper in a veterinary journal for trying to reuse … Continue reading Cock and bull story leads to retraction of bovine herpesvirus paper
The Journal of Clinical Investigation has retracted two papers from the lab of one of Stanford University’s most prominent cancer researchers over concerns about the integrity of the data. The articles, published in 2012 and 2014, described work on ways of priming the immune system to enhance the activity of drugs to fight cancer. The … Continue reading Stanford calling for retractions of work by deceased star cancer researcher
The journal Cureus is retracting three articles by a mashup of authors from Pakistan and the United States for plagiarism, which the researchers blame on their use of a hired gun to prepare the papers. The articles were published over a roughly one-month stretch in August and September 2018 and covered an impressively polymathic range … Continue reading “We got scammed:” Authors “sincerely apologize” for plagiarism they blame a ghostwriter for
First it was there. Now it’s gone. In March 2018, three researchers at Atatürk University in Turkey published“Investigation Of The Critical Factors Affecting E-Government Acceptance: A Systematic Review And A Conceptual Model” at the Innovative Journal of Business and Management, where it was freely available during 2018. It has no DOI, and no citations (that … Continue reading A “clandestine retraction” as a paper disappears from a management journal without a trace