In late June, we wrote about a case of wholesale plagiarism involving an education researcher in California, Thienhuong N. Hoang. Our post prompted a flurry of emails from readers cluing us in to other cases in which Hoang, of California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, had lifted essentially entire articles from other scholars and changed little, if anything, but the author information.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found that a Boston University cancer researcher made up experiments reported in two papers funded by National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health grants. According to the ORI notice:
Sheng Wang, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine Cancer Research Center: Based on the Respondent’s acceptance of ORI’s research misconduct findings, ORI found that Dr. Sheng Wang, who has been an Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine Cancer Research Center (BUSM), engaged in research misconduct in research supported by National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), grants R01 CA102940 and R01 CA101992.
The authors of two Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) studies of the molecular underpinnings of hearts whose rhythms have gone awry have retracted the papers, for reasons that are not completely clear.
Kalasalingam University in India has fired a professor who last month blamed unethical students for data manipulation that forced the retraction of three papers amid questions about five more.
As Krishna Pillai of the K2P blog reports, Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, head of Kalasalingam’s biotechnology department, was asked to resign, and did so on Friday, August 5. Kalasalingam also revoked the registrations of six graduate students who were co-authors on the retracted papers. Here’s the university press release with the details.
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.
One of the authors of a paper in Physical Review Letters has withdrawn it, after someone pointed out an error.
