Did Diederik Stapel tip his pitches in a paper about a plagiarism scandal?

Do fraudsters, like bad pitchers or poker players, have “tells”?

Diederik Stapel might. Last week we reported that Stapel, an internationally recognized social psychologist from The Netherlands, had been accused of fabricating his data. An alert Retraction Watch reader has pointed us to a 1999 paper by Stapel with the impossibly ironic title: “Framed and misfortuned: identity salience and the whiff of scandal.”

In the article, which appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Stapel and two colleagues reported the results of survey they’d conducted of Dutch psychologists in the wake of a major plagiarism scandal involving an unidentified Dutch clinical psychologist (“we decided to use neither the name of the person who was accused of plagiarism nor the university to which he was affiliated,” they wrote).

Put briefly, the researchers claimed to have found (rather unsurprisingly) that how psychologists identified themselves professionally dictated how strongly they were affected personally by the scandal. Money quote: Continue reading Did Diederik Stapel tip his pitches in a paper about a plagiarism scandal?

Group under investigation retracts second paper, claims errant figure was just a placeholder

The authors of a 2010 Journal of Immunology paper have retracted it, saying that part of one of the figures was actually a placeholder from another experiment.

According to the retraction notice for “Stimulation of FcgRI on Primary Sensory Neurons Increases Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I Production, Thereby Reducing Reperfusion-Induced Renal Injury in Mice” by Naoaki Harada, Juan Zhao, Hiroki Kurihara, Naomi Nakagata, and Kenji Okajima: Continue reading Group under investigation retracts second paper, claims errant figure was just a placeholder

Duke sued over Potti case

Anil Potti, courtesy Duke

From the “not terribly surprising” department: Eight patients — or their estates — who enrolled in clinical trials at Duke overseen by Anil Potti and colleagues have sued the university.

The 90-page lawsuit, which names Duke, Potti, Potti’s boss Joseph Nevins, CancerGuide Diagnostics (in which Potti and Nevins had an interest), among others, does a thorough job of documenting the case. In particular, it reviews the history of the trials, which were stopped in 2009, restarted, and then stopped for good as more and more issues came to light. It emphasizes, as you would expect, that Duke and the Potti team were warned repeatedly about problems in their work, notably by Keith Baggerly and a colleague.

Potti and colleagues have, as Retraction Watch readers will remember, now retracted five papers.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Thomas Henson, told Raleigh-Durham’s ABC11: Continue reading Duke sued over Potti case

Oxford University Press clarifies policy: All retraction notices will be open access

Last week, we reported on an uniformative retraction notice in Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE), an Oxford University Press (OUP) title, that the publisher wanted $32 to read. To OUP’s credit, they quickly acknowledged that the retraction hadn’t been handled properly.

Earlier this week, OUP’s senior publisher for journals Cathy Kennedy followed up with some welcome news: Continue reading Oxford University Press clarifies policy: All retraction notices will be open access

Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices

We can only imagine how Joe Hollyfield felt to learn from us, of all people, that his journal, Experimental Eye Research, had retracted two manuscripts in a recent issue.

The papers, “Mechanisms of retinal ganglion cell injury and defense in glaucoma,” by Qu J, Wang D, and Grosskreutz CL, and “Mitochondria: Their role in ganglion cell death and survival in primary open angle glaucoma,” by Osborne, NN, carried the same retraction notices:

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.

Because in our experience such unhelpful wording often masks interesting details — read, author misconduct — we called Hollyfield for comment. He graciously walked us through the retractions, explaining the case in detail, until we realized that we were talking about different papers entirely. Hollyfield, it turned out, thought we were asking about the travails of Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, an eye researcher from India whom we’d previously covered and whose work recently had been retracted by Experimental Eye Research and other journals for image manipulation.

But Hollyfield was unaware of the two retractions we’d intended to talk about with him and told us he’d look into them.

Here’s what he learned: Continue reading Publisher error handling two eye papers leads to retractions, new policy on notices

Dutch university investigating psych researcher Stapel for data fraud

Tilburg University in the Netherlands has suspended the prominent social psychologist Diederik Stapel over concerns that he fabricated data in his published studies. According to a translation of a press release from the school, Stapel, professor of cognitive social psychology and dean of Tilburg’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, “has committed a serious breach of scientific integrity by using fictitious data in his publications.”

The release says the rector of Tilburg has set up a committee to investigate Stapel’s manuscripts and report back by October. Heading the panel is W.J.M. Levelt, former* president of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and professor emeritus at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

What the release does not specify, however, is which of Stapel’s many publications — a Medline search comes up with at least 45 bearing his name — are implicated. Continue reading Dutch university investigating psych researcher Stapel for data fraud

Anil Potti failed to disclose corporate ties in yet-to-be-retracted JAMA papers

Anil Potti, the former cancer researcher whose work has become the subject of intense scrutiny that has already led to the retraction of five papers, didn’t tell the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) about two very relevant corporate relationships he had when he published papers there, Retraction Watch has learned.

JAMA has published two papers by Potti and colleagues: 2008’s “Gene Expression Signatures, Clinicopathological Features, and Individualized Therapy in Breast Cancer,” and 2010’s “Age- and Sex-Specific Genomic Profiles in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.”

The Cancer Letter, which has been way out front in the Potti case, first reported Potti’s relationships with Eli Lilly and CancerGuide Diagnostics (formerly Oncogenomics, Inc.). As The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, reported last September, the two companies cut their ties with Potti in July 2010 after allegations of misconduct and lying about a Rhodes Scholarship came to light.

But that was after the two papers were published, and Potti had relationships with both since 2006. As The Chronicle notes, he was a director at CancerGuide Diagnostics (formerly Oncogenomics, Inc.), and Continue reading Anil Potti failed to disclose corporate ties in yet-to-be-retracted JAMA papers

Science genetics paper retracted after “unfortunate mistake”

Sometime last year, the University of Zurich’s Erik Postma was reading a paper in Science titled “Additive Genetic Breeding Values Correlate with the Load of Partially Deleterious Mutations” when he realized something.

The authors, led by Joseph Tomkins of the University of Western Australia, had made a mistake.

Postma set to writing a “Technical Comment,” the way that Science usually deals with criticism of a paper’s methods. He sent his first draft to the Tomkins group: Continue reading Science genetics paper retracted after “unfortunate mistake”

Tune to NPR this weekend to hear Retraction Watch on “On The Media”

This week’s episode of NPR’s “On The Media” features a conversation about retractions between Ivan and co-host Brooke Gladstone. You can listen online, or find a station that carries the program.

The show also includes an interview about retractions with Jonah Lehrer.

Earlier: Retraction Watch on NPR’s Science Friday. Listen here (with transcript).

Montreal Heart Institute researcher dismissed following two retractions for image manipulation

A Montreal Heart Institute researcher who retracted two papers less than a month ago has been fired from his post.

Zhiguo Wang, who had been funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the Canadian Diabetes Association, studied the genes linked to heart rhythm abnormalities, among other subjects. Wang also has an appointment at the University of Montreal.

As first reported in Retraction Watch, Wang withdrew two papers for the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) in the journal’s August 12 issue. The story was quickly picked up by Postmedia and the CBC. At the time, Wang told us: Continue reading Montreal Heart Institute researcher dismissed following two retractions for image manipulation