Don Poldermans, the cardiology researcher in the Netherlands whose prominent career came to disgrace in a rather confusing scandal, finally has a retraction.
Poldermans, formerly of Erasmus Medical Center, copped to charges of misconduct but not of fraud in the case — which, if you speak Dutch, you can read about in detail here.
As we wrote in 2012: Continue reading First retraction appears in case of cardiologist Poldermans
A group of Swiss neurologists have lost their 2013 article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience after reporting that their data were rendered null by coding errors.
The article, “Spontaneous pre-stimulus fluctuations in the activity of right fronto-parietal areas influence inhibitory control performance,” purported to find that: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Authors retract brain paper with “systematic human error in coding”
The journal Tropical Animal Health and Production has retracted a 2013 paper by a group from India whose data on feeding young cows special wheat wasn’t quite what it was cracked up to be.
The article, “Nutritional evaluation of wheat straw treated with Crinipellis sp. in Sahiwal calves,” found that: Continue reading Journal dumps grain paper for controversial data
Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, the Groningen sex researcher (and Ig Nobel winner) who misused the 1985 thesis of an American scholar, and the work of another researcher, in at least five published articles, has tallied another retraction in the affair, his sixth.
As we reported earlier, Schultz had been cleared of plagiarism but found to have abused the work (in an “unintended and unknowing” fashion, we’re told) of one Diana Jeffrey, by taking passages from her dissertation without acknowledgement. These articles are pretty long in the tooth, having been published in the 1990s.
The latest, in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, appeared in 1992. Titled “Sexual rehabilitation after gynecological cancer treatment,” Schultz wrote it with a colleague H.B.M. Van de Wiel, whose name shows up on the other retractions, too.
According to the notice: Continue reading Another retraction for sex researcher Weijmar Schultz
Researchers have retracted a fourth paper following an investigation at Cardiff University that found evidence of image manipulation by a researcher named Rossen Donev.
Here’s the notice for “The mouse complement regulator CD59b is significantly expressed only in testis and plays roles in sperm acrosome activation and motility,” a paper first published in Molecular Immunology in 2008: Continue reading Fourth retraction results from Cardiff investigation
A bumper crop of material about misconduct, peer review, and related issues came to our attention this week, so without further ado: Continue reading Weekend reads: Most scientific fraudsters keep their jobs, random acts of academic kindness, and more
An edited version of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, the book withdrawn from shelves in 2012 by his publisher Houghton Mifflin because he had fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan, will be released in Germany next month, according to a report in the German media.
In a story titled “Free ride for the falsifier” (“Freie Fahrt für den Fälscher”), Buchreport.de reports (via Google Translate) that despite the known fabrications, “the publisher wants to keep the book on creativity:” Continue reading Jonah Lehrer’s German publisher will release adjusted version of Imagine sans fabricated quotes
We’re a bit late to this, but a Federal court in Massachusetts last fall heard a medical malpractice case with fascinating implications for journals.
The case involved allegations by the plaintiffs — two children who had suffered permanent birth defects and their mothers — that they had lost previous malpractice suits because a fraudulent case report was being used to bolster the defense.
The case targeted two ob-gyns, Henry Lerner, of Harvard, and Eva Salamon, of the Bond Clinic, in Winter Haven, Fla., who had published the case study in question. It also named the clinic itself and the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, which published the article in early 2008.
The article, titled “Permanent brachial plexus injury following vaginal delivery without physician traction or shoulder dystocia,” purported to show:
An Israeli terrorism scholar has lost a review of a 2011 book on Al-Qaeda because he published it twice in different outlets.
The researcher, Isaac Kfir, is with the International Institute for Counter- Terrorism, where he studies
issues relating to post-conflict reconstruction (security issues) and transitional justice (restorative and retributive justice). His other research looks at the effect of Islamic radicalism within the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The book in question is Al-Qaeda: From Global Network to Local Franchise, by Christina Hellmich of the University of Reading in the UK. The offending article appeared in Terrorism and Political Violence, a Taylor & Francis title. According to the notice: Continue reading Zero dark thirty for Al-Qaeda article
A group of researchers in China has lost a paper on the human microbiome in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology for cannibalizing much of it from previously published work by other scientists.
The article, titled “Human gut microbiota: dysbiosis and manipulation,” appeared on Sept. 27, 2012, and was written by a team from the Beijing Genomics Institute-Shenzhen. It has been cited just once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, by another paper in the same journal.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Gut instinct: Intestinal flora paper yanked for plagiarism