Nature has issued an Expression of Concern for a paper co-authored by a scientist who threatened to sue us last year for writing about another Expression of Concern for one of his other papers. Here’s the “Editorial Expression of Concern” for “Non-adaptive origins of interactome complexity:”
A former Vanderbilt University biomedical engineer committed fraud on a massive scale, according to a new Office of Research Integrity (ORI) report. Igor Dzhura is banned from receiving federal funding for three years, and is retracting six papers, which have been cited more than 500 times. Since leaving Vanderbilt, he has worked at SUNY Upstate … Continue reading Updated: Former Vanderbilt scientist faked nearly 70 images, will retract 6 papers: ORI
This one brings together a bunch of our favorite topics, including plagiarism, poetry, and predatory publishers. Look, alliteration! Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who often publishes under the name R-L Etienne Barnett, has been accused of plagiarizing at least 18 articles by other scholars, mostly analyses of French poetry, as well as duplicating his own work at least eight … Continue reading Tracking down lit crit plagiarism leads to “discourses of madness”
Chang-Suk Han, a member of the engineering faculty at Hoseo University in South Korea, has had ten articles retracted at once because of duplicated data. Here are the ten studies from Metals and Materials International:
PubPeer leads the way again: The authors of a paper about Parkinson’s disease in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have retracted it, several months after a commenter highlighted the exact issue that led to the article’s demise. The paper, originally published in September 2013, was called into question by a commenter on … Continue reading Authors retract PNAS paper questioned on PubPeer after original films can’t be found
PLoS One has retracted a 2013 article on atherosclerosis in mice over concerns about the integrity of the data. The paper, “The Effect of Soluble RAGE on Inhibition of Angiotensin II-Mediated Atherosclerosis in Apolipoprotein E Deficient Mice,” came from a group of researchers in South Korea. It purported to show that:
When retraction notices and expressions of concern appear, particularly those that are opaque, we try our best to find out what’s behind them, whether it’s better explanations or the steps that led to moves. Today, we have one story in which we’ve been able to learn a lot more than usual. In April, Bas van … Continue reading A PNAS expression of concern appears — and so does its revealing backstory
When we heard about this retraction, we were forced to ask: Are there any articles left in Journal of Vibration & Control? The publication was forced to retract 60 papers by the same author in July, after he was caught exploiting a technological loophole to review his own papers. Now, papers on loading cargo ships … Continue reading Two-timing sinks papers on ships in journal shaken by major scandal
A mistaken molecular structure has led to a retraction and a withdrawal for group in India studying optical crystals. Here’s the notice for “Crystal growth and spectroscopic characterization of Aloevera amino acid added lithium sulfate monohydrate: A non-linear optical crystal” in Spectrochimica Acta Part A:
A pair of researchers at the University of Maryland have retracted a third paper. Here’s the unhelpful Journal of Biological Chemistry notice for “Inhibitor of Nrf2 (INrf2 or Keap1) protein degrades Bcl-xL via phosphoglycerate mutase 5 and controls cellular apoptosis,” by Suryakant Niture and Anil Jaiswal: