A Brazilian entomologist, Claudio Jose von Zuben, has been forced to retract two papers from 1997 after editors became aware that he and his colleagues had used the same figure in both.
First, the notice from Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz: Continue reading Duplication forces retractions of two 15-year-old entomology papers
Sometimes, the headlines just write themselves.
Two scientists in India have had a paper retracted after it became clear they had plagiarized a study by a Swedish researcher. Here’s the notice for “A conceptual model of people’s approach to sanitation,” from Science of the Total Environment: Continue reading Plagiarism flushes sanitation paper
Are plagiarists parasites? And what if they work in the field of parasitism — like M. Shafiq Ansari and colleagues at Aligarh Muslim University in India?
The Journal of Insect Behavior is retracting a 2011 paper by Ansari’s group, “Foraging of host-habitat and superparasitism in Cotesia glomerata: A gregarious parasitoid of Pieris brassicae,” for its similarity to a 2003 article on the same species by other researchers. The insect in question is a form of wasp that, in a case of life imitating Alien, lays its eggs in living caterpillars, which the little buggers eat from the inside out. (Turnabout apparently is fair play in this grisly interaction.)
Here’s the retraction notice (it’s a PDF): Continue reading Parasitology plagiarists get retraction — and a publishing ban
One of the things we try to do here at Retraction Watch is keep tabs on retracted work that appears again the literature. We did that twice in one day last year, once with a paper about chimps that was retracted from Biology Letters and ended up in the Journal of Human Evolution, and then again with a PLOS ONE paper on on “longevity genes” that had been retracted from Science.
Today, we have another case. Continue reading A retracted Cell paper reappears elsewhere, sans author who didn’t sign retraction notice
The journal Experimental and Clinical Transplantation has retracted three papers by a group of Lebanese researchers who appear to have been engaging in illicit trafficking of human kidneys.
According to the notice: Continue reading Transplant journal retracts three papers over possible organ trafficking
Late last year, we covered a paper wondering why there were so few retractions in business and economics journals. That post was on our minds as we read a fantastic piece of reporting by reporters at the Scarlet & Black, the Grinnell College student paper.
The story concerns Brian Swart, a Grinnell economics professor who “abruptly resigned in the middle of last semester,” reporters Peter Sullivan and Hayes Gardner note. As is unfortunately often the case, the university wouldn’t say why Swart was leaving. But Sullivan and Gardner didn’t leave it there. They talked to “professors from other institutions involved in the situation” and got the food of investigative reporters everywhere: Documents. Those interviews and documents showed that: Continue reading One plagiarized economics paper that won’t need to be retracted
A group of researchers from Taiwan has been forced to retract their 2012 paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy for what appears to be a case of double submission.
The paper was titled “Electricity harvest from wastewaters using microbial fuel cell with sulfide as sole electron donor.”
As the retraction notice explains: Continue reading “Different but similar” data lead to retraction of fuel cell paper
The journal Oncogene has retracted a 2005 paper from a group led by Jose Roman-Gomez, a Spanish researcher who appears to be a serial image manipulator/misappropriator.
The article, “Promoter hypomethylation of the LINE-1 retrotransposable elements activates sense/antisense transcription and marks the progression of chronic myeloid leukemia,” was published online in September 2005 and has been cited 106 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Now comes this: Continue reading Lifted figure prompts retraction of Oncogene paper by Roman-Gomez
Given the subject of Retraction Watch, readers often email us with papers they’d like us to look into, whether for alleged image manipulation, potential plagiarism or duplication, or other issues. As we explain in question five of our FAQ, we don’t have the resources to do such investigations, unfortunately; we can’t even keep up with all of the actual retractions.
Other sites, such as Science Fraud and Abnormal Science, have tried to fill that gap, and a number of the papers those sites questioned have been retracted. But Abnormal Science is on a long hiatus, and Science Fraud was of course shuttered by legal threats last month. So with that in mind — and also because we also get emails asking the best way to report alleged misconduct — our new LabTimes column is a stepwise guide for those who have concerns about papers that they’d like to see addressed. Continue reading How to report allegations of scientific misconduct
Diederik Stapel is up to 49 retractions.
Here are the latest three, from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: Continue reading “When we wonder what it all means”: Stapel retraction count rises to 49