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
Annette Schavan, the German minister for education and research, has had her PhD revoked by the University of Dusseldorf following an investigation into alleged plagiarism.
Der Spiegel reports: Continue reading German education and research minister Schavan loses doctorate over plagiarism
There’s a new retraction in the journal Carbon.
The case didn’t involve a Carbon copy — say, plagiarism or duplication — but rather an instance of fraud in a Japanese university, part of a larger case we covered last August.
Here’s the retraction notice for the paper, “The role of Fe species in the pyrolysis of Fe phthalocyanine and phenolic resin for preparation of carbon-based cathode catalysts,” which appeared in August 2010: Continue reading “False data” forces retraction of Carbon paper co-authored by postdoc who led to PI’s suspension
If you went looking for ten of our posts about Anil Potti today, you would have seen error messages instead. That’s because someone claiming to be from a news site in India alleged we violated their copyright with those ten posts about the former Duke University cancer researcher who has had 19 papers retracted, corrected, or partially retracted.
The truth of the matter, as is often the case, is exactly the opposite of the allegations. Here’s the email we received from Automattic — which owns WordPress, our blog host — earlier today: Continue reading WordPress removes Anil Potti posts from Retraction Watch in error after false DMCA copyright claim
Diederik Stapel has a new retraction, his 46th.
Here’s the notice for “The effects of diffuse and distinct affect. ” by Diederik A. Stapel, Willem Koomen and Kirsten I. Ruys, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002: Continue reading Retraction 46 arrives for Diederik Stapel