The week at Retraction Watch featured a particularly misleading retraction notice, and a university stripping a graduate of her PhD for misconduct. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
This morning, our thoughts are with the people of Paris. The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper claiming dramatically higher rates of sexual trauma among men in the military, and a look at whether gender plays a role in peer review. Also: We’re hiring. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Authors of a study on a potential biomarker for ovarian cancer have been hit with two retractions after the results were published twice. We don’t usually see both copies of a duplicated paper retracted, but this is a somewhat unusual case. In November 2011, a group of authors submitted the paper to Gynecologic Oncology. But two months’ prior, the … Continue reading “Dual submission issues” retract both copies of ovarian cancer paper
The authors of a Cell Metabolism paper are pulling it after discovering blot images that “appear more than once in independent and unrelated experiments.” Just how the duplication occurred in the 2009 paper — about transcription of mitochondrial DNA — remains a mystery, the authors note: …the reasons for the errors are still under investigation… Meanwhile, … Continue reading University investigating duplicated images in retracted paper
An electrical engineering paper published in April has been retracted because of similarities to a 2012 paper from different authors, including “almost identical” data in two of the papers’ tables. The authors were unable to provide the original numbers for the suspect tables, along with a pair of “similar” figures, which bore a striking resemblance … Continue reading Retraction strikes power grid paper with “almost identical” content to previous study
We’ve learned about two more retractions we missed for Diederick Stapel, the Dutch social psychology researcher who has now racked up a total of 57 retractions by our count. Both retractions were issued after a committee released a report which established fraud in dozens of papers co-authored by Stapel. Stapel is still #4 on our leaderboard.
This week at Retraction Watch featured nine more fake peer review retractions, this time from Elsevier, and an update to the retraction count for one-time record holder Joachim Boldt. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
To one reader of a paper on a nerve cancer, the researchers, based at a hospital in China, seemed to have found a very large number of cases of a rare cancer to study. That observation triggered an investigation into the paper that led to its retraction — and the concern that the authors in the paper never did … Continue reading There’s “no evidence” research was conducted at all in retracted cancer paper
An investigation at Karolinska Institute has led to the retraction of a paper about drug treatments for alcoholics, after concluding the article contains a “very careless data workup.” The paper, “Memantine enhances the inhibitory effects of naltrexone on ethanol consumption,” found that the drug memantine (normally used to treat Alzheimer’s) enhances the effects of naltrexone in rats, which blocks the … Continue reading Investigation finds “careless data workup” in alcoholism drug paper
Plant researcher Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva has been banned from submitting papers to any journals published by Taylor & Francis. The reason: “continuing challenges” to their procedures and the use of “inflammatory language.” This is the second time Teixeira da Silva has been banned by a publisher — last year Elsevier journal Scientia Horticulturae told him that … Continue reading Biologist banned by second publisher