It’s a nice way to celebrate our first anniversary this week: Ivan will appear today on Science Friday, the nationally syndicated NPR program hosted by Ira Flatow.
You can listen online, or find a station near you that carries it, if you’re in the U.S. It’s live, so call in — you know we love hearing from Retraction Watch readers. It will also be archived on the site, so you can listen later.
Update, 5:15 Eastern, 8/5/11: Here’s that archived audio (top left corner).
The Journal of Phytopathology has retracted a 2010 article by a French researcher who apparently misled editors about her role in preparing the manuscript.
Adam and Ivan at Retraction Watch HQ, aka NYC's Market Diner
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the launch of Retraction Watch. We’d like to thank our readers, tipsters, and fans for your support and feedback — and our helpful critics who have spurred us to do better.
Over the past 12 months we’ve written more than 250 posts about retractions ranging from the extraordinary — think Joachim Boldt and his 90-odd withdrawals, and the Byzantine case of Silvia Bulfone-Paus — to the trivial (much of the plagiarism, for instance); the laudable (a swift one in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, to pick one) to the ludicrous (the reason for that retraction is “none of your damn business,” one editor told us).
We haven’t done a careful count — more on more rigorous indexing later — but those posts cover something like 200 retractions, given that there are more than 120 between just Boldt, Bulfone-Paus, and Naoki Mori. That is unusually high activity for a 12-month period; the annual average for the previous 10 years was about 80. (Let us be the first to point out that any correlation between our founding and that high number does not imply causation.)
Toronto Dingos, photo by Ovesny Navarro http://bit.ly/nRirhi
If there’s any group of subjects a scientist wouldn’t want to piss off, it would have to be Aussie-rules football and rugby players, who are tough enough to make a saltwater crocodile wish it was a belt. And when those guinea pigs are suffering from low back pain — well, we shudder to think.
The journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders has retracted two papers from a group of Australian researchers who appear to have lied about having received IRB approval for their studies of back pain in rough-sport athletes.
There’s another retraction in the the complicated case of Milena Penkowa, the former University of Copenhagen researcher being investigated for scientific misconduct and misuse of grant funds. The paper, in Experimental Physiology, was titled “Exercise-induced metallothionein expression in human skeletal muscle fibres” and was published online in January 2005.
A group of Turkish researchers has retracted a paper purporting to show a method of calculating the thermodynamic properties of certain transition metals, because it was plagiarized from another article. The withdrawn paper, “A simple analytical EAM model for some bcc metals,” was published in 2010 in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation.
The laboratory of Michael Hertl, a German dermatology researcher with an international reputation, is under investigation for possible misconduct, according to a legal official at Hertl’s institution, Philipps-Universitat Marburg.
The journal Angiogenesis is retracting two articles by a group of researchers in India whom it accuses of using manipulated images in six other publications as well.
The news isn’t getting any better for Carsten Carlberg. Earlier this month, Carlberg received a pink slip from the University of Luxembourg in the wake of a data fraud scandal involving a former student named Tatjana Degenhardt. As we wrote last November, journals retracted two of Carlberg’s papers after Degenhardt was found to have fabricated data. Although Degenhardt worked at the University of Kuopio (now the University of Eastern Finland), and Carlberg was not accused of wrongdoing, officials in Luxembourg decided that the mess threatened the public image of their fledgling institution and fired him.
It’s a nice way to celebrate our first anniversary this week: Ivan will appear today on Science Friday, the nationally syndicated NPR program hosted by Ira Flatow.
