We have an update on an evolving and puzzling story involving our posts about Anil Potti that have been temporarily removed from Retraction Watch.
Someone claiming to be Anil Potti — and whom we have good reason to believe is actually him, for reasons we’ll get into — emailed us tonight to say that he had “no part whatsoever” in the takedown of Retraction Watch posts about him: Continue reading Anil Potti tells Retraction Watch he wasn’t behind DMCA takedown notices of posts about him
Retraction Watch readers may recall that earlier this month, WordPress removed ten of our posts about Anil Potti — the former Duke oncology researcher who has retracted or corrected 19 papers — after a false DMCA copyright claim against us. The site which claimed the copyright violations — and which no longer exists — actually plagiarized our posts, not the other way around.
We’re still waiting for those posts to be reinstated; our understanding is that they’ll be back later this week. In the meantime, Nanopolitan, another site that wrote about Potti has been hit with what looks like a false DMCA claim.
Blogger, Nanopolitan’s host, has taken down one post. One of the owners of Nanopolitan, Abi, writes: Continue reading Another site hit with DMCA takedown notice for post about Anil Potti
Call it uncreative non-destruction. 
A team from China and, it appears, Mississippi, has lost a paper in Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation for duplicate publication.
Here’s the notice (a PDF): Continue reading Duplication leads to collapse in Nondestructive Testing
A rising star at MIT has retracted a paper after an investigation found that her former postdoc had “falsified or fabricated figures.”
Alice Ting, winner of an NIH Directors Pioneer Award and named one of Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35,” published the paper, “Imaging Activity-Dependent Regulation of Neurexin-Neuroligin Interactions Using trans-Synaptic Enzymatic Biotinylation,” in Cell in 2010 along with Amar Thyagarajan.
The notice is refreshingly detailed given the circumstances: Continue reading MIT lab retracts Cell synapse tagging paper for falsification or fabrication
Today brings two journal editorials about misconduct and retractions. They take, if we may, a bit of an optimistic and perhaps even blindered approach.
In an editorial titled “Scientific misconduct occurs, but is rare,” Boston University’s Richard Primack, editor of Biological Conservation, highlights a Corrigendum of a paper by Jesus Angel Lemus, the veterinary researcher who has retracted seven papers: Continue reading Not in my journal: Two editors take stock of misconduct in their fields — and don’t find much
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