Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch: I am a postdoc and looking to supplement my income with medical writing (our lab recently didn’t get it’s funding renewed, so now on part-time to minimise costs). The most recent jobs I have been offered are two brief reports and one full article. A quick internet search of … Continue reading Is it ethical to ghost-write a paper?
A pair of engineering researchers has analyzed the work of a handful of prolific scientific fraudsters, and has concluded that science needs a “shame list” to deter future misconduct. The paper, “Analysis and Implications of Retraction Period and Coauthorship of Fraudulent Publications,” by Jong Yong Abdiel Foo and Xin Ji Alan Tan, of Ngee Ann … Continue reading Does science need a retraction “shame list?”
It’s been a busy week here at Retraction Watch, with breaking news about hotly debated papers from Nature and about GMOs, but there have been interesting stories about retractions and scientific misconduct elsewhere, too. Here’s a sampling:
The Danish Committees for Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) is calling for the retraction of a politically sensitive article by Helmuth Nyborg, a controversial Danish psychologist, over concerns about referencing and authorship. The 2011 paper, “The Decay of Western Civilization: Double Relaxed Darwinian Selection,” appeared in Personality and Individual Differences, a prestigious journal in the field, and … Continue reading Citing “scientific dishonesty,” Danish board calls for retraction of controversial paper on decline of Western civilization
Irony alert: If you’re going to publish in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, you’d better be able to play well with others. Not so, it seems, with a certain Darrel Montero. Montero, an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University, and his colleagues have lost their … Continue reading Social work researchers lose paper for misuse of data
A 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: … Continue reading Virtually verbatim text earns retraction of neonate paper, gives authors a pass
Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch: As experts in authorship matters, I was wondering if you could offer some guidance. I read that all authors have to approve submission of a paper. Unfortunately, a colleague of mine recently passed away. The manuscripts which he helped draft are being submitted with our colleague as author with … Continue reading Ask Retraction Watch: How should deceased colleagues be credited in papers?
The authors of an article in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules have pulled the paper in what appears to be an authorship dispute sparked by premature submission. The paper, “Renaturation and one step purification of the chicken GIIA secreted phospholipase A2 from inclusion bodies,” came from a group of researchers in Tunisia and Marseille, … Continue reading Retraction for iffy data as authors of chicken enzyme paper lay an egg
The journal Clinical Research and Regulatory Affairs has retracted a 2012 article on over-the-counter drugs by a trio of pharmacy researchers in India who decided to “reproduce content to a high degree of similarity” from other sources. Here’s how the retraction notice puts it:
Okay, so it’s not quite Kafka, but a group of forensic geneticists from Prague’s Charles University has lost a paper in Folia Biologica (a journal from that famed institution where Kafka studied) over what appears to be a rather Byzantine dispute about authorship and the quality of the data. The 2010 article, “DNA analysis of … Continue reading Author stalemate in Czech DNA paper leads to retraction