Scientist threatening to sue PubPeer claims he lost a job offer because of comments

sarkar
Fazlul Sarkar, via Wayne State

Last month, PubPeer announced that a scientist had threatened to sue the site for defamation. At the time, all PubPeer would say was that the “prospective plaintiff” is a US researcher” who was “aggrieved at the treatment his papers are getting on our site.”

Today, PubPeer revealed the that the prospective plaintiff was Fazlul Sarkar, a distinguished professor of pathology at Wayne State University in Detroit. Sarkar’s attorney, Nicholas Roumel, tells us that Sarkar had a job offer from the University of Mississippi, which rescinded it after seeing comments about his work on PubPeer.

We asked to see the letter rescinding the offer, but Roumel said he couldn’t send it because he and Sarkar are “in the process of making a claim against them.”

We also asked if there was an investigation into Sarkar’s work. Roumel told us:

As for any investigation, federal regulations make such things strictly confidential, so I can’t comment either way.

According to a post on PubPeer: Continue reading Scientist threatening to sue PubPeer claims he lost a job offer because of comments

Solvent paper dissolves under heat of institutional investigation

Jced_coverA chemical engineering paper published in February has been retracted for data and authorship problems.

According to the retraction notice, the authors’ institutions investigated and found that not only was the data not reproducible, but “not all co-authors on the manuscript were aware of or agreed to the content and scientific conclusions in the article.”

Here’s the notice in the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data for “Ionic Liquids as Promising Solvents for Biomass Derived Mannitol and Xylitol”: Continue reading Solvent paper dissolves under heat of institutional investigation

Researcher who broke into lab up to nine retractions

bichaw_v053i036.inddKarel Bezouška, a researcher who broke into a lab refrigerator to tamper with an investigation into his work, has nine retractions.

Here’s the retraction notice in Biochemistry for 2010’s “Cooperation between Subunits Is Essential for High-Affinity Binding of N-Acetyl-d-hexosamines to Dimeric Soluble and Dimeric Cellular Forms of Human CD69:” Continue reading Researcher who broke into lab up to nine retractions

Weekend reads: Reading Nature and Science “very unpleasant,” how to spot fake journals

booksThe week at Retraction Watch featured revelations about the backstory of an expression of concern, and Office of Research Integrity findings in a case that had its beginnings in Retraction Watch comments. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: Reading Nature and Science “very unpleasant,” how to spot fake journals

Image manipulation forces retraction of hepatitis C paper

ljii20.v032.i04.coverA group of researchers from Egypt has lost their 2013 article on hepatitis C in the Journal of Immunoassay and Immunochemistry for fudging their figures.

The article was titled “In vitro neutralization of HCV by goat antibodies against peptides encompassing regions downstream of HVR-1 of E2 glycoprotein.” According to the abstract: Continue reading Image manipulation forces retraction of hepatitis C paper

Economics paper retracted for plagiarism after citing its twin

econmodAs we’ve pointed out before, economics and business journals have few retractions compared with the other academic literature. Opinions vary on why this is, but the fact that only a few journals have plagiarism policies can’t help.

Research Papers in Economics, or RePEc, an organization that maintains a database of economics papers, however, thoroughly investigates accusations of misconduct. A RePEc report, which indicated that the plagiarists were polite enough to cite the original paper, was used in the notice as evidence for a retraction in Economic Modelling.

Here’s the notice for “Retraction notice to “Analysis of nonlinear duopoly game with heterogeneous players”: Continue reading Economics paper retracted for plagiarism after citing its twin

Is it time for a retraction penalty?

labtimesThe title of this post is the headline of our most recent column in LabTimes, which begins:

As we write this in mid-August, Nature has already retracted seven papers in 2014. That’s not yet a record – for that, you’d have to go back to 2003’s ten retractions, in the midst of the Jan Hendrik Schön fiasco – but if you add up all of the citations to those seven papers, the figure is in excess of 500.

That’s an average of more than 70 citations per paper. What effect would removing those citations from calculations of Nature’s impact factor – currently 42 – have?

Science would lose 197 citations based on this year’s two retractions. And Cell would lose 315 citations to two now-retracted papers.

In other words, what if journals were penalised for retractions, putting their money where their mouth is when they talk about how good their peer review is? Clearly, if a paper is retracted, no matter what excuses journals make, peer review didn’t work as well as it could have.

We explore what this might mean for top journals. But there are some nuances here. We wouldn’t want to further discourage retractions of papers that deserved it. One solution: Continue reading Is it time for a retraction penalty?

Former UT-Southwestern cancer researchers faked data in 10 papers: ORI

ut southwesternThe Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has ruled in a case we’ve been following for nearly two years — and which seems to have been launched after Retraction Watch readers took a careful look at figures from what appeared to be an unrelated case.

Takao Takahashi and Makato Suzuki, both former postdocs at a cancer research center at UT-Southwestern, both “knowingly, intentionally, and recklessly falsified data” in a total of 10 papers, according to the ORI. Takahashi, now at Gifu University in Japan, was responsible for fakery in four papers, while Suzuki, now at Kumamoto University Hospital, also in Japan, falsified data in six.

We reported on the retraction of the four Takahashi papers, and one of the Suzuki papers, in November 2012. At that time, Adi Gazdar, the head of the lab where the researchers worked, told us that
Continue reading Former UT-Southwestern cancer researchers faked data in 10 papers: ORI

Publisher updates with more info on staph retraction

cidWe brought you this story last week, about a paper on drug resistant staph being retracted for a lab error. Now, we’ve got an update from Rachel Safer, senior editor for medical journals at Oxford University Press, where the paper was published.

Apparently, the researchers “inadvertently relied upon the use of a test system that was not approved for the microorganism studied in their paper,” leading to the retraction, and the corresponding author of the study wasn’t initially all that responsive:

Continue reading Publisher updates with more info on staph retraction

A PNAS expression of concern appears — and so does its revealing backstory

pnas 1113When retraction notices and expressions of concern appear, particularly those that are opaque, we try our best to find out what’s behind them, whether it’s better explanations or the steps that led to moves. Today, we have one story in which we’ve been able to learn a lot more than usual.

In April, Bas van Steensel, Wendy Bickmore, Thomas Cremer, and Kerstin Bystricky sent a letter to about 80 leading labs in nuclear organization and steroid receptor biology. It began (we’ve added some relevant links): Continue reading A PNAS expression of concern appears — and so does its revealing backstory