Olivier Voinnet, a researcher at ETH in Zurich and the winner of the 2013 Rössler Prize, is correcting a number of papers following critiques of more than a dozen of his studies on PubPeer. The work appears in journals including Cell and PNAS. Voinnet’s co-author on several of the papers, David Baulcombe, who is also … Continue reading Award-winning plant researcher correcting several papers critiqued on PubPeer
Frontiers in Pharmacology has retracted a paper on baicalin, an antioxidant sold in health food stores, because it had both “incorrect data and invalid statistical analyses.” A comment on PubPeer notes that one of the figures (see image to the right) contains two similar-looking flow cytometry images labeled with different values, which could be what the … Continue reading “Incorrect data” kills apoptosis paper
Jens Christian Schwamborn, a stem cell researcher at the University of Luxembourg, is retracting a 2007 paper on how to grow brain cells. The paper, “Ubiquitination of the GTPase Rap1B by the ubiquitin ligase Smurf2 is required for the establishment of neuronal polarity,” was published while Schwamborn was at Westfälische Wilhelms‐Universität Münster in Germany. An anonymous … Continue reading Stem cell researcher retracts neuron paper for “image aberrations”
Piero Anversa, a stem cell researcher at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a colleague, Annarosa Leri, have sued Harvard over an investigation into their work that they claim has cost them millions in a forfeited sale of their company, and job offers. The team has had a paper in Circulation retracted, and a paper in … Continue reading Stem cell researchers sue Harvard, claiming faulty investigation lost them job offers
A trio of skin specialists in Egypt has lost a 2009 paper in the Indian Journal of Dermatology for duplication. And the journal wasn’t happy about it. The article, “Serum mucosa-associated epithelial chemokine in atopic dermatitis : A specific marker for severity,” came from a group at Ain Shams University in Cairo. According to the … Continue reading Rash decision? Duplicate submission of dermatitis paper leads to publishing ban
News elsewhere about scientific integrity, publishing, and related issues abounded this week:
Former University of Tokyo researcher Shigeaki Kato continues to put big numbers on the board. Last month, we reported on his 26th, 27th, and 28th retractions, all in Nature Cell Biology and cited close to 700 times. Yesterday, EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports published a total of five more retractions for the endocrinology researcher, who … Continue reading Shigeaki Kato up to 33 retractions, with five papers cited a total of 450 times
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”