The ECG from the retracted paper, which the journal said was mislabeled.
A paper by a medical student and an associate professor in Florida has been retracted for errors with the central finding of the study, an electrocardiogram whose labeling “does not actually represent any of the characteristics” of the tracing.
While thousands of papers cite themselves, the percentage that do so is relatively low. Haunschild & Bornmann/arXiv.org
While using bibliometric techniques to measure how disruptive research papers are to their field of study, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann stumbled across a strange phenomenon.
Just under 45,000 academic papers contained citations to themselves, they found. Haunschild and Bornmann — both information scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany — found these “paper self-citations” in journals indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science since 1980.
Some 7,943 different journals had at least one self-citing paper, the researchers report in their study, posted on arXiv.org earlier this month. Eight journals alone covered 10% of the sample papers, and 129 publications covered the top third. More than 31,000 of the papers appeared under the ‘article’ category in Web of Science, followed by just over 6,000 listed as ‘corrections’ and just under 2,500 as ‘reviews.’
A former Baylor College of Medicine researcher has been debarred from federal funding for two years after a review by the Office of Research Integrity found evidence of misconduct.
Liping Zhang, a former assistant professor in the school’s nephrology section, “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) funds,” according to a notice scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on March 19.
ORI based its findings on a Baylor College of Medicine investigation as well as evidence gathered during its oversight review, the notice states. It continues:
Among the critiques of a new article is a figure (left) duplicated from a retracted paper (right).
A second paper on a contested pain disease is under investigation after sleuths raised questions about the methodology and possible fabrication of data.
Last year, Scientific Reportsretracted a paper comparing the condition, which the authors dubbed Middle East Pain Syndrome, to rheumatoid arthritis for failing to establish a clear distinction between the two ailments.
The new article, published in January in BMC Rheumatology with two overlapping authors, compares MEPS to fibromyalgia, claiming it is distinct for its “hand tufts spur-like excrescences.”
Frontiers has issued a retraction and multiple corrections for papers in several of its journals after the publisher discovered a reviewer had been impersonated.
Alla El-Din Bekhit is listed as the editor of the retracted article, a study of the potential anti-cancer effects of asparagus extract published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in May 2023. According to the retraction notice, dated January 26, the article contained duplicated images and “concerns were raised regarding scientific validity of the article.” The notice continues:
Further, the investigation confirmed that a non-genuine email address was used to impersonate Alaa El-Din Bekhit and the real Alaa El-Din Bekhit did not take any actions on this manuscript.
“In the face of the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education calls for urgent reflections on this historical moment’s implications for design, research, and education in architecture,” the call for papers read.
Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, Osaka University
A microbiologist formerly of Osaka University has lost four papers, with at least one more retraction pending, after an institutional investigation found fabrication and falsification of data in his published research.
The investigation found evidence of manipulated results in seven of the papers examined. The university published the notice of its completed inquiry, along with a full report in Japanese, on February 6.
The report did not name the scientists or cite the articles investigated, but it did include a figure or table with altered data from each paper. Three papers retracted in February mentioned an investigation by Osaka University in the notices; Yukihiro Hiramatsu was the first author on all three. Comparing the figures in the report with ones in Hiramatsu’s publications, we identified the seven articles. (See the list here.)
A prisoner and guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment. | PrisonExp.org
Philip G. Zimbardo passed away in October 2024 at age 91. He enjoyed an illustrious career at Stanford University, where he taught for 50 years. He accrued a long list of accolades, but his singular and enduring contribution to scholarship was the Stanford Prison Experiment, a simulation carried out in the university’s psychology department in August 1971. The research project became the best-known psychological analysis of institutionalization at the time.
The study has always been treated with skepticism by penologists and psychologists, and recent scholarship by social scientist Thibault Le Texier has raised fundamental questions about the scientific validity of the investigation, the originality of the research design, the unethical treatment of the subjects, and the credibility of the reported results.
Many consider Zimbardo’s SPE to be one of the classic studies of experimental psychology in the post-war period. It continues to be reported as a landmark achievement in many psychological textbooks today, despite drawing decades of criticism both in and out of the scientific literature. But considering Le Texier’s findings, should Zimbardo’s work be retracted?
