The New York Times Magazine has a great profile — featuring an in-depth interview — of Diederik Stapel this weekend. Check it out. (Or, if you’re visiting us because the magazine was kind enough to include a link to Retraction Watch, welcome! And find all of our Stapel coverage here.)
One of a number of highlights in the piece by Yudhijit Battacharjee: Continue reading An illuminating profile of Diederik Stapel in the New York Times Magazine
They say that a poor workman blames his tools. If you’re a scientist and you discover your tools don’t do exactly what you thought they did, however, the right thing to do is let other scientists relying on your work know.
That’s what the University of Auckland’s Nigel Birch and colleagues did recently, after a 2012 study they published in the Journal of Neurochemistry didn’t hold up. Here’s the notice, which we’d consider a model for retractions everywhere: Continue reading A model retraction in the Journal of Neurochemistry for “unexpected effect” of a filter
A team of researchers in Ireland has retracted two papers from Cancer Letters after concerns were apparently raised about some of the studies’ figures.
Denise Egan, of the Institute of Technology Tallaght in Dublin, and colleagues published “In vitro anti-tumour and cyto-selective effects of coumarin-3-carboxylic acid and three of its hydroxylated derivatives, along with their silver-based complexes, using human epithelial carcinoma cell lines” and “A study of the role of apoptotic cell death and cell cycle events mediating the mechanism of action of 6-hydroxycoumarin-3-carboxylatosilver in human malignant hepatic cells” in 2007.
The two notices say the same thing: Continue reading Two cancer papers retracted because authors “are unable to guarantee the accuracy of some of the figures”
Martin Biosse-Duplan, a former Harvard dental school research fellow found by the Office of Research Integrity to have falsified results has had the two papers in question retracted.
From the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research: Continue reading Two retractions appear for former Harvard dental researcher found to have committed misconduct
The International Journal of Neuroscience, an Informa Healthcare journal, has retracted a paper it published earlier this year after learning that the article was the doctoral work of another scientist — not listed among the authors — that had appeared previously in a Persian-language journal.
The retraction notice, admirably thorough, explains what happened with the paper:
Nature is retracting a 2010 paper by a team from Princeton and Drexel on the workings of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria in people. How that came about seems to have been a winding road.
The article — a research letter — titled “Branched tricarboxylic acid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum,” came from the Princeton lab of Manuel Llinás. It purported to find that:
Continue reading Authors retract already-corrected Nature malaria paper
Last month, we covered the retraction of a paper by A.M.K. El-Ghonemy, of Al-Jouf University in Saudi Arabia. The engineer now has a second retraction in the same journal, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
Here’s the notice for “Waste energy recovery in sea water reverse osmosis desalination plants, Part-1: Review”: Continue reading Saudi engineer loses second fresh water paper for plagiarism
A team of neuroscientists in Japan has lost their 2012 article in Brain Research for duplicating elements of a figure from a paper they’d published earlier that year in another journal.
The article, “Dynamic changes of mitochondrial fission proteins after transient cerebral ischemia in mice,” came from a lab at Okayama University. The last author was Koji Abe. According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Mitochondrial fission paper falls for fusing data from earlier work
Talanta, a journal serving the analytical chemistry community — we’d love to know how the name came to be — has retracted a 2013 article by a group of Indian researchers over an authorship dispute.
The paper, “Non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor based on silver/silver oxide nano-rods reinforced with multiwall carbon nanotubes,” appeared in January, with the authors listed as Leila Shahriary, Santosh K. Haram and Anjali A. Athawale.
But according to the retraction notice:
Continue reading “Conflicts among the authors” force retraction of Talanta paper
For the second time this month, Retraction Watch has been slapped with the threat of a lawsuit, this time Ariel Fernandez, whose work in BMC Genomics became the subject of a recent expression of concern.
Today, Fernandez emailed one of us (Adam) the following message:
Continue reading Retraction Watch threatened with legal action…again