Call it uncreative non-destruction. A team from China and, it appears, Mississippi, has lost a paper in Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation for duplicate publication. Here’s the notice (a PDF):
As regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed, a number of sites have sprung up recently to examine — quite critically — papers that other scientists say are dodgy. There’s Abnormal Science, for example, which has not been updated since last February, and a Japanese whistleblower took to YouTube to demonstrate what was wrong with … Continue reading Facing legal threats, Science Fraud temporarily suspends posting
Researchers often like to complain that science journalists puff up their results to sell newspapers. And there’s no question that reporters make missteps. But a commentary published today in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine brings to mind the old saying about those who live in glass houses not casting the first stones. In … Continue reading Researchers: Stop the spin and boasting in articles, say other researchers
A dozen years might seem like a publishing eternity, but the European Journal of Cancer has decided to purge a duplicate paper from 2000. The article, on the utility of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for detecting prostate cancer, comes from a group whose work in this area has been widely cited as evidence for … Continue reading Duplication forces retraction of paper by group whose work is used to justify prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing
We’re following the case of a group that recently retracted a Nature Immunology paper for figure irregularities, soon after being forced to correct images in a Science paper for similar reasons. The Nature Immunology paper, “The helminth product ES-62 protects against septic shock via Toll-like receptor 4–dependent autophagosomal degradation of the adaptor MyD88,” has been … Continue reading Group retracts Nature Immunology paper for figure irregularities after posting a correction to Science
A few days after Clinical Infectious Diseases published a set of guidelines for using antibiotics in patients with cancer and dangerously compromised immune systems, we noticed that they had retracted the paper. The Medline notice read:
About two months ago, we posted an item on a curious retraction as the first installment in our Best of Retractions series. In the notice of the retraction in Agricultural Water Management, the editor wrote: Reason: During the second revision of the manuscript, the authors modified Figure 1 (changing the label from “Israel” to “Historical … Continue reading Update on a Best Of retraction: Elsevier edits notice suggesting renaming Israel “historical Palestine” was political
Assistant researcher, Retraction Watch Database The Center For Scientific Integrity, a U.S.-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, is looking for a full-time Assistant Researcher to join our crew in maintaining the Retraction Watch Database (RWDB), the world’s most comprehensive, manually curated database of retractions. The RWDB, owned by Crossref and maintained by The Center For Scientific Integrity, … Continue reading Job opportunities at Retraction Watch
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately … Continue reading Weekend reads: Western publishing at a ‘breaking point’; NIH to cap publisher fees; sleuths say their work is being ‘weaponized’
The retraction of a paper looking at posts in a Reddit subforum about mental illness has once again raised questions about informed consent in research using public data. To study the experience of receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a U.K.-based team of researchers collected posts from the Reddit subforum r/schizophrenia, which is dedicated to discussing … Continue reading Do you need informed consent to study public posts on social media?