Cardiac arrestees: Questions surface about Heart paper from Italian group that faces charges

heartcoverWe don’t usually cover “pretractions” (see #5 for why), but our friend Larry Husten over at Forbes has a story today about what appears to be a dead paper walking.

The article, in Heart, comes from a group of prominent researchers in Italy who have been arrested for possibly failing to adequately consent their patients, among other potential misdeeds.

According to Husten, the 2010 article in question, “A randomised trial of target-vessel versus multi-vessel revascularisation in ST-elevation myocardial infarction: major adverse cardiac events during long-term follow-up,” by Maria Grazia Modena (a past president of the Italian Society of Cardiology) and colleagues, may have been grossly misrepresented to the journal. Continue reading Cardiac arrestees: Questions surface about Heart paper from Italian group that faces charges

Virtually verbatim text earns retraction of neonate paper, gives authors a pass

jmfnmA pair of authors from Italy has retracted their 2012 article in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine for including chunks of text with a “high degree of similarity” from other published sources. But rest assured: the authors, we’re told, didn’t intend to do so.

The article, “Central venous catheterization and thrombosis in newborns: update on diagnosis and management,” appeared in a supplemental issue of the journal covering the proceedings of the XVIII Congress of the Italian Society of Neonatology.

According to the retraction notice (which, we’re told, was inadvertently behind a pay wall until we asked for it): Continue reading Virtually verbatim text earns retraction of neonate paper, gives authors a pass

Publishing in triplicate leads to polymer paper retraction

j app polymerA chemist at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia has lost a paper because it was the third time he had published some of it.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Publishing in triplicate leads to polymer paper retraction

Ask Retraction Watch: What happens to a paper draft after a lab member realizes data are flawed?

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Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/bilal-kamoon/

Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch:

A lab member is asked to write up a paper with some data and after a couple of drafts and some more experiments he/she realizes the data is flawed. The lab head decides to pursue the paper anyway and writes it up with another lab member. Can they use the first drafts made by the first lab member (use the introduction, the methods, and parts of the discussion)? Or can that be considered plagiarism? And if it is plagiarism, what can the first lab member do?

Take our poll, and comment below. Continue reading Ask Retraction Watch: What happens to a paper draft after a lab member realizes data are flawed?

Journal withdraws diabetes paper written by apparently bogus authors

BBRCTalk about a Trojan Horse.

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications has withdrawn a paper it published earlier this year on metabolic proteins linked to diabetes, not because the article was bogus but because the authors appear to have been. The work itself is accurate — indeed, it likely belongs to a Harvard scientist, Bruce Spiegelman, who’d presented his data on the subject several times recently and was in the process of preparing his results for publication. We’ve written about researchers trying to punk journals with faked articles, and about a researcher who apparently made up a co-author, but here’s something new!

Nature has the story. According to Nature, in July Spiegelman: Continue reading Journal withdraws diabetes paper written by apparently bogus authors

Journal of Virtual Studies retracts Second Life paper that was, um, virtually on its second life

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Nikolaos Pellas

Second Life is a virtual reality site in which you can “Experience endless surprises and unexpected delights in a world imagined and created by people like you.” Only Nikolaos Pellas, of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, is now having two papers on virtual reality retracted because he apparently experienced endless surprises and unexpected delights in a world imagined and created by other people.

Here’s one notice from the Journal of Virtual Studies: Continue reading Journal of Virtual Studies retracts Second Life paper that was, um, virtually on its second life

Plant journals uproot duplicate publications that authors used as a hedge

pmbpA group of researchers in India has lost two articles in the plant literature for shenanigans with duplicate submission.

One article, “Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation and efficient regeneration of a timber yielding plant Dalbergia sissoo Roxb,” appeared online last June in the journal. The authors were from institutions in Orissa.

According to the retraction notice, the paper was a case of “thanks, but no thanks.” What’s worse, the researchers seem to be under the impression that they’ve done nothing wrong. Because they said so. Continue reading Plant journals uproot duplicate publications that authors used as a hedge

Big trouble in little China: Two looks at what warps scientific publishing there

economistThe press corps has turned its attention to scientific publishing in China this week.

Here’s Naomi Ching’s lede — that’s how we spell it in journalism — from Nautilus:

You may have heard that Chinese researchers are not very well compensated, compared to their Western counterparts. What you might not know is that they can increase their income by a factor of 10 with a single publication. The better the journal they publish in, as judged by the average number of times that its papers are cited, the more money they make. According to an anonymous source specializing in science evaluation in China, some research institutions follow a simple formula for determining cash rewards: 10,000 yuan, multiplied by one plus the journal impact factor (the impact factor reflects average citation levels). For example, publication in The Lancet, whose impact factor was 39.06 in 2012, would fetch 400,600 yuan (about $65,000). By comparison, the average yearly income of Chinese scientific researchers was 39,850 yuan in 2007, according to a survey by the China Association for Science and Technology.

Hmm, that sort of incentive wouldn’t create any problems, would it? Read the rest of Ching’s piece for more.

And here’s Gady Epstein’s top, from The Economist: Continue reading Big trouble in little China: Two looks at what warps scientific publishing there

Cancer cell line mixup leads to retraction

ccr 9-15At team of researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center has retracted a paper after realizing that the cell lines they were using weren’t what they thought they were.

Here’s the detailed notice: Continue reading Cancer cell line mixup leads to retraction

Marc Hauser’s second chance: Leading science writers endorse his upcoming book

Evilicious-CoverYesterday, Marc Hauser, the former Harvard psychologist found by the Office of Research Integrity to have committed misconduct, tweeted that his new book, Evilicious, is coming out on October 15.

An excerpt of the book, which was originally scheduled to be published by Viking/Penguin, is available at Hauser’s website. (We learned about the book in a blog post by Andrew Gelman.) Viking/Penguin is apparently no longer publishing it, however, as the book will be available “at Amazon as a Kindle Select, for print-on-demand at Createspace, and as an audio book at Audible (also available on Amazon).”

What caught our eye were two blurbs. One was from Nicholas Wade, former science editor of the New York Times, who covered the Hauser case, and co-authored 1983’s Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. The other was from Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

Wade: Continue reading Marc Hauser’s second chance: Leading science writers endorse his upcoming book