Authors of “just make up an…analysis” Organometallics paper issue mega-correction

organometallicscoverBack in August we — and others — wrote about a paper in Organometallics for which one member of the study team appeared to have instructed a co-author to pad the article with artificial results. From the supplemental information (SI) of that paper:

Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…

Now comes a correction statement from the group that can only be described as “mega.” First reported last month by Chemical & Engineering News, the lengthy notice begins: Continue reading Authors of “just make up an…analysis” Organometallics paper issue mega-correction

Doing the right thing: Journal clears unknowing author of plagiarism

ausjforsciHere’s a nice case of a journal taking pains to clear the name of an author.

Last summer we wrote about a case of plagiarism involving two authors from India who’d published a paper on biometrics in the Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences.

Now — seven months later, we’ll note — one of those authors has gotten a reprieve. A notice in the journal states that the researcher had nothing to do with the misconduct.

At the time, the notice for the paper, “Multiple facial soft biometrics for person identification system,” read: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Journal clears unknowing author of plagiarism

Nobel Prize winner calls peer review “very distorted,” “completely corrupt,” and “simply a regression to the mean”

brenner
Sydney Brenner

Sydney Brenner has been talking about what’s wrong with the scientific enterprise since long before he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002.

And in a new interview, Brenner doesn’t hold back, saying that publishers hire “a lot of failed scientists, editors who are just like the people at Homeland Security, little power grabbers in their own sphere.”

In a King’s Review Q&A titled “How Academia and Publishing Are Destroying Scientific Innovation,” Brenner says: Continue reading Nobel Prize winner calls peer review “very distorted,” “completely corrupt,” and “simply a regression to the mean”

RIP, Ed Rickards: Duke watchdog who covered Anil Potti case dies at 72

dukeIt’s unusual for us to post obituaries on Retraction Watch — we’ve published just one so far in three-and-a-half years — but we wanted to pause for a moment to note the passing of a tireless crusader for transparency and accountability whose electronic path crossed with ours a number of times since 2012 because of our shared interest in the case of Anil Potti.

We learned of the death of Ed Rickards this weekend while Ivan was attending ScienceOnline 2014. The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, reported on February 5: Continue reading RIP, Ed Rickards: Duke watchdog who covered Anil Potti case dies at 72

Weekend reads: How much can one scientist publish? And more stem cell misconduct

booksAnother busy week at Retraction Watch, including a ScienceOnline 2014 session Ivan facilitated on post-publication peer review. Here’s a selection of what was happening elsewhere on the web: Continue reading Weekend reads: How much can one scientist publish? And more stem cell misconduct

Hip disjoint: Dysplasia paper lacks proper attribution, earns retraction

ajhbcoverA suggestion: When you title your paper “Joined at the hip?”, better make sure it’s not too close for comfort to someone else’s work.

Alas, an Idaho anthropologist failed to heed that lesson when she published “Joined at the hip? A paleoepidemiological study of developmental dysplasia of the hip and its relation to swaddling practices among indigenous peoples of North America,” in the American Journal of Human Biology last October.

The article, by Samantha Blatt, of Boise State University, found that: Continue reading Hip disjoint: Dysplasia paper lacks proper attribution, earns retraction

“Unfortunately, scientific publishing is not immune to fraud and mistakes”: Springer responds to fake papers story

springerWe have an update on the story of 120 bogus papers being removed by IEEE and Springer. The latter posted a statement earlier today, which we include in its entirety below: Continue reading “Unfortunately, scientific publishing is not immune to fraud and mistakes”: Springer responds to fake papers story

Clone call for bird gene bar-coding paper

molecules and cellsA group of bird researchers in Korea has lost their 2006 paper on DNA barcoding of that country’s avian species because they feathered the article with material from others.

The paper, “DNA barcoding Korean birds,” appeared in Molecules and Cells, published by Springer for the Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology and has been cited 88 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. According to the abstract: Continue reading Clone call for bird gene bar-coding paper

Nature paper retracted following multiple failures to reproduce results

nature 2-27-14An international team of researchers from the NIH, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and two Chinese universities — Fourth Military Medical University and China Medical University — has retracted their 2012 paper in Nature after they — and a number of other groups — were unable to reproduce the key results.

The original abstract for “The NAD-dependent deacetylase SIRT2 is required for programmed necrosis” said that the findings

implicate SIRT2 as an important regulator of programmed necrosis and indicate that inhibitors of this deacetylase may constitute a novel approach to protect against necrotic injuries, including ischaemic stroke and myocardial infarction.

But here’s the notice, by corresponding author Toren Finkel and colleagues: Continue reading Nature paper retracted following multiple failures to reproduce results

“Knowledgeable informant” topples ovarian cancer paper

ijcepA group of cancer researchers in China has lost their 2013 paper in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology after someone tipped off the journal that the data were copied.

The article, “Importance of spondin 1 and cellular retinoic acid binding protein 1 in the clinical diagnosis of ovarian cancer,” came from Ting-Ting Jiao, Ye-Min Zhang, Lin Yao, Yuan Gao, Jian Sun, Dong-Fang Zou, Guo-Ping Wu, Dan Wang, Jun Ou, Ning Hui, who work at various Shanghai hospitals.

Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading “Knowledgeable informant” topples ovarian cancer paper