The journal Environmental Entomology (that’s insects, not words) is retracting a 2010 paper on a sugarcane-loving borer insect by a group from south Florida.
The article, “Life Table Studies of Elasmopalpus lignosellus (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) on Sugarcane,” came from the Everglades Research & Education Center, an arm of the University of Florida.
According to the notice: Continue reading Sweet nothings: Buggy data force retraction of sugarcane pest paper
We’ve heard about a lot of barriers to retraction — author and editor stubbornness being the most frequent. But now there’s a new one: A publisher that wants to charge authors $650 to retract.
University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall — who produces a frequently updated list of predatory publishers — first wrote about the case on his blog last week. Beall alerted a journal about a duplication more than two years ago, and who re-reported it earlier this month when he failed to see a retraction.
What seems to have happened, according to an email exchange between the editor of one of the journals and the two authors of the two papers, is that Pit Pruksathorn, then a PhD student at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, submitted a paper to the Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, a Springer title, without letting his advisor know. Prukshathorn wrote that Continue reading Publisher wants $650 to retract duplicated study
We’ve learned a lot about retractions in 2012, from the fact that most retractions are due to misconduct to the effects they can have on funding. We’ve seen eyebrow-raising reasons for retractions, from a hack of Elsevier’s peer review system to a researcher peer reviewing his own papers, to massive fraud in psychology to a math paper retracted because some of made “no sense mathematically.”
So as the year winds to a close, we wanted to take a look at retractions by the numbers.
1. How many retractions in 2012? Continue reading How many retractions were there in 2012? And, some shattered records
An accounting professor at a Boston-area college has resigned a month after publishing a retraction that has sparked extensive discussion on Retraction Watch.
The Boston Globe reported late last week that James E. Hunton will leave Bentley University on December 31, with a spokesperson telling the paper he was leaving for “family and health reasons.”
Hunton and a co-author retracted “A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion” from the Accounting Review on November 9. The notice was scant, but the authors left a comment on our post with details: Continue reading Accounting professor resigns following retraction
Terry S. Elton, a researcher at Ohio State University in Columbus who studies genetic expression in various heart conditions and Down syndrome, has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for fabricating and/or falsifying data in a number of NIH grants and resulting papers.
According to an OSU statement sent to Retraction Watch last night, it was an anonymous whistleblower who alerted the university to the potential misconduct in July 2010. The ORI report notes that he two OSU investigations, along with the ORI investigation, found that Elton: Continue reading ORI: Ohio State researcher manipulated two dozen figures in NIH grants, papers
How should journals deal with duplication — aka “self-plagiarism?”
Scientists have engaged in vigorous debates here on Retraction Watch about whether such duplication is a minor form of scientific misconduct, or just a conflict between the interests of publishers and those of researchers who have better things to do than figure out different ways to describe their materials and methods.
So we thought we’d highlight how an obstetrics and gynecology journal recently handled a six-year-old duplication. Here’s the “notice of redundant publication:” Continue reading A different tack: A “notice of redundant publication,” rather than a retraction, for duplication
Alirio Melendez, a former National University of Singapore immunologist whose story we’ve been following here since a retraction in September of last year, committed misconduct on an “unprecedented” scale, according to the university, involving more than 20 papers.
Nature’s Richard van Noorden has the scoop:
After a 19-month investigation, the National University of Singapore (NUS) today says that it has determined that one of its former scientists, the immunologist Alirio Melendez, has committed “serious scientific misconduct”. The university found fabrication, falsification or plagiarism associated with 21 papers, and no evidence indicating that other co-authors were involved in the misconduct, it says.
Melendez has retracted five papers so far, as we’ve reported, but NUS wouldn’t give the whole list. They tell Nature: Continue reading NUS: Melendez committed “serious scientific misconduct,” but don’t expect to get any details
The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, or JACC, has issued expressions of concern for three papers by Don Poldermans, the Dutch cardiologist who was fired earlier this year amid allegations of misconduct.
Cardiobrief’s Larry Husten had the story first.
The, um, heart of the matter is that neither the investigators at Erasmus Medical Center, Poldermans’ former institution, nor the JACC editors, can say whether the researchers conduct rose to the level of fabricating data. As the Notice of Concern states: Continue reading Concern — in triplicate — arrives for Poldermans papers
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity is investigating work done at a Caltech lab after researchers there couldn’t replicate it, and retracted a paper based on the findings.
Here’s the notice, which ran this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Continue reading ORI investigating work from Caltech lab as PNAS paper is retracted
As Retraction Watch readers know, we cover Elsevier’s journals frequently, including a story just last week about their peer review system being hacked. And they’ve written about us, too. So we’re pleased to present a guest post by Elsevier’s Linda Lavelle, General Counsel-North America, about the publisher’s take on plagiarism and other unethical behavior — and what the company is doing to prevent it.
Protecting Good Science: Upholding Publishing Ethics
If a plagiarist plagiarizes from an author who herself has plagiarized, do we call it a wash and go for a beer? That scenario is precisely what Steven L. Shafer, MD, found himself facing recently. Dr. Shafer, editor-in-chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia, learned that authors of a 2008 case report in his publication had lifted two-and-a-half paragraphs of text from a 2004 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.
Wait. Stop. Does the preceding paragraph sound familiar? Chances are, no. But in fact, I lifted it, word for word, from a piece by Adam Marcus in Anesthesiology News, January 2011. (A similar post also ran here at Retraction Watch, with attribution.) Does this kind of cut-and-paste happen in research publishing today? Sadly, yes. According to Science (Vol. 324, May 22, 2009), an estimated 200,000 of 17 million articles in the Medline database may have been duplicates or plagiarized. One percent may seem like a relatively small incidence. But the sheer number is disturbing. Continue reading How is Elsevier promoting ethical publishing? A guest post