The Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary Medicine (JEBCAM) has retracted a 2013 review on probiotics by an author from Turkey who patched the paper together from a variety of other sources — and then appears to have reused his own work elsewhere without attribution.
The article was written by Öner Özdemir, a pediatric allergy specialist at İstanbul Medeniyet University. According to the abstract: Continue reading Plagiarism spells demise of complementary medicine paper
If it looks like a duck flu study, and quacks like a duck flu study, and it’s word-for-word the same as a duck flu study…
Zoonoses and Public Health has retracted a 2013 paper on bird flu in Myanmar because the authors had published the article previously in a different journal.
The article, “Risks of Avian Influenza (H5) in Duck Farms in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta Region, Myanmar,” was written by a group led by Alongkorn Amonsin, of the Department of Veterinary Public Health at Chulalongkorn University, in Bangkok, Thailand.
Per the abstract: Continue reading Duck, duck, gone: Duplication plucks bird flu paper
Last month we wrote that Haruko Obokata, the Japanese stem cell researcher whose work is under a cloud of suspicion, had agreed to call for the retraction of one of two disputed Nature papers about her findings. Now Reuters is reporting that Obokata will ask for the second article to be pulled, as well (one of the articles was a research letter).
According to the Reuters account: Continue reading Obokata agrees to retract both STAP stem cell papers: Report
Imagine you were a cop, sitting in your squad car at the side of the road with a radar gun, when you clock someone speeding. You turn on your lights, pull the speedster over to the side of the road, and walk to her driver’s side window.
Just as you say “Driver’s license and registration, please,” you realize the driver is your squad captain. Oops.
That must have been something like what it was like — with plagiarism detection software sitting in for the radar gun — for the co-editor-in-chief of Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome when he realized that Marilia de Brito Gomes, the other co-editor-in-chief, had published two papers in their journal that contained plagiarized passages.
Here’s the notice for “Historical facts of screening and diagnosing diabetes in pregnancy:” Continue reading Editor in chief steps down after being found plagiarizing in her own journal
From the world of physics, we have a retraction involving rivalry and alleged sock puppetry. The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology has removed a letter from its website after a scientist complained that it was making unproven allegations against him.
It’s a head-scratching case. The letter, from Lorenzo Iorio, first appeared in the journal on April 28. Here’s how Neuroskeptic describes the background: Continue reading Journal retracts letter accusing physicist of using fake names to criticize papers
Bharat Aggarwal, the MD Anderson researcher who has threatened to sue Retraction Watch for writing about issues in his papers, has corrected another study.
Here’s the notice for “Induction of Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis by the Proteasome Inhibitor PS-341 in Hodgkin Disease Cell Lines Is Independent of Inhibitor of Nuclear Factor-κB Mutations or Activation of the CD30, CD40, and RANK Receptors:” Continue reading Cancer researcher who threatened to sue Retraction Watch corrects another paper
Science reported last week that Jens Förster, the former University of Amsterdam social psychologist embroiled in data fabrication controversy, may have stumbled in his defense by muddling the timeline of his disputed studies in public statements.
According to a piece by Frank van Kolfschooten (which is behind a paywall, and to which we linked in Saturday’s Weekend Reads):
The real challenge to Förster’s timeline may lie in e-mails between him and Pieter Verhoeven, his research assistant at UvA from September 2008 to June 2009, who made the correspondence available to Förster’s accuser. In it, the two discuss how to conduct what are evidently the same experiments Förster’s blog declares were completed much earlier in Bremen. For instance, among the stimuli used are three unintelligible audio recordings, which the 2011 paper says were described to the subjects as “Moldavian” poems. In an 18 May 2009 e-mail, Verhoeven comes up with the idea to describe the poem that way, rather than as Malaysian, because the reader of the poem has a German accent.
But in a yet another lengthy open letter to colleagues and friends, Förster insists that he conducted the studies in Germany before coming to the University of Amsterdam. And he hints darkly at the end that those seeking to cast doubt on his research may be doing so for personal gain: Continue reading Förster on defense again, this time weighing in on timeline controversy
The authors of a 2005 article on E. coli in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology have lost the paper because they recombined it from previous work.
The article, titled “Strategies for efficient production of heterologous proteins in Escherichia coli,” came from a pair of biochemical engineers from the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, in New Delhi, India.
According to the abstract: Continue reading De-coli: Plagiarism leads to retraction of highly cited recombinant protein paper
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, with Harvard dominating the news about scientific misconduct here and elsewhere. Here’s what else was happening around the web: Continue reading Weekend reads: Förster defense crumbling, peer-reviewed journalism, heated rhetoric about replication
The following post was written by a former research fellow in the lab of Piero Anversa to whom we’ve promised confidentiality. Anversa has previously told us that he cannot comment because of an ongoing investigation.
Regular readers of Retraction Watch will note the recent news regarding the work conducted in the laboratory of Piero Anversa at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. In the early 2000s, his laboratory published a series of papers regarding the regenerative qualities of bone marrow-derived and cardiac-resident “stem cells.”
Those initial findings, as well as the research conducted since those early studies, have always been surrounded by controversy, as many have been unsuccessful in efforts to replicate their results. Controversy among competitors is not uncommon in our profession, but this particular one has blossomed into a formal investigation of their findings, and has, to date, led to the retraction of one paper and an expression of concern about another. Continue reading Braggadacio, information control, and fear: Life inside a Brigham stem cell lab under investigation