The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of an entire issue of a journal and a renewable energy researcher agree to retract ten papers for recycling, and saw The Australian put us on its list of “30 Most Influential” in higher education for 2016. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A group of authors has earned two retractions for a pair of papers on which they had “severe conflicts of author sequences,” according to the retraction note. All of the authors were involved in a recent spate of compromised peer review that hit Springer journals back in August. Among the 64 retracted papers this summer, one … Continue reading Authors retract two papers for “severe conflicts of author sequences”
An appeals court has affirmed the stiff prison sentence for Dong-Pyou Han, the former Iowa State University researcher who faked the results of an HIV vaccine experiment in rabbits.
Romanian officials are taking a stand against a long-standing oddity in the law that entitles prisoners to 30 days off their jail sentence for every piece of academic writing they author. The crackdown is occurring after a surge in jail literature in the last two years— approximately 200 inmates have authored around 400 scientific works … Continue reading Romanian law shortens jail time for prisoners who write books. (They may ax it.)
This week at Retraction Watch featured a literally bullshit excuse for fake data, a new record for time from publication to retraction, and news of an upcoming retraction from Science. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Authors are retracting a 2012 paper on cholesterol metabolism in zebrafish after realizing it included a case of mistaken identity in a DNA sequence crucial to some aspects of the experiment. A postdoc misidentified the plasmid in question after failing to fully sequence it before including it in the experiment. A technician in the lab found … Continue reading Misidentified DNA leads authors to retract zebrafish cholesterol paper
We have a new record for the longest time from publication to retraction: 80 years. It’s for a case report about a 24-year-old man who died after coughing up more than four cups of what apparently looked — and smelled — like pee. According to the case report titled “Een geval van uroptoë” published in 1923, … Continue reading We have a new record: 80 years from publication to retraction
Nature retracted a paper on protein structures today, six years after an investigation at the University of Alabama identified several structures that were “more likely than not falsified and/or fabricated” by one of the authors. The paper came under scrutiny soon after it was published in 2006. A letter published in Nature that same year pointed … Continue reading Nature retracts paper six years after it was flagged for fraud
Here’s our first post of 2016. The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction from JAMA, and our list of most-cited retracted papers. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
It’s been a great 12 months for Retraction Watch. We took some major steps as an organization. Some highlights: