Quick updates on work by two people whose names appear frequently on Retraction Watch: Diederik Stapel and Ulrich Lichtenthaler. Last month, we reported on the 50th retraction for Stapel. Here’s number 51 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, for “The flexible unconscious: Investigating the judgmental impact of varieties of unaware perception:”
Laurence Cole, an obstetrics researcher at the University of New Mexico, made an appearance on this blog in November 2011 after the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published a remarkably heavy-handed retraction of one of his papers. Shortly after, we learned that the retraction was preceded by a strongly-worded letter from an attorney representing … Continue reading New Mexico obstetrics researcher violated research subject protocols: Retraction notice
Last year, Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues posted a paper, scheduled for an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, with a, shall we say, provocative title: NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science In an interview last year with Lewandowsky, NPR gathered some of the reactions … Continue reading Why publishers should explain why papers disappear: The complicated Lewandowsky study saga
The Surgeon has retracted a 2012 article by a group from the U.K. who took text from a previously published article. So, you say? Nu? Well, we found — through relatively little effort — that the plagiarizees were themselves, shall we say, liberal in their use of material from other sources. The retracted article was … Continue reading Post 982 — in which we find plagiarized bone graft paper that grafted from other papers
A group of cancer researchers in Argentina has retracted a paper on the p300 protein in breast cancer that appeared in Experimental and Molecular Pathology. The article, titled “Intracellular distribution of p300 and its differential recruitment to aggresomes in breast cancer,” was published in 2010 by Maria E. Fermento and colleagues. It has been cited 11 … Continue reading The “unintentionality” of being leads to nothingness for paper on protein’s role in cancer
A paper about a high-profile human fossil has been mysteriously removed from the journal that published it just two weeks ago. Here’s the notice for “The oldest human fossil in Europe dated to ca. 1.4 Ma at Orce (Spain),” originally published on March 5:
We have poked fun at Pattern Recognition Letters before for failing to catch blatant plagiarism. We probably should have held off on those jokes for this post. A group of IT researchers from India has suffered the retraction of a paper in PRL for heavily basing the piece on at least four previous papers written … Continue reading “Considerable overlap” leads to retraction of medical imaging paper
An immunologist found by a former employer to have committed misconduct in more than 20 papers has had another paper retracted. Here’s the notice for “Refining siRNA in vivo transfection: Silencing SPHK1 reveals its key role in C5a-induced inflammation in vivo,” by Alirio Melendez and colleagues in The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology:
The journal Inorganica Chimica Acta has retracted a paper it published earlier this year over an authorship dispute involving the lead researcher and his colleagues in France. The title of the paper — whose bulk alone gave us a headache — was “Reaction of a bidentate ligands (4,4′-dimethyl 2,2′-bipyridine) with planar-chiral chloro-bridged ruthenium: Synthesis of … Continue reading Paper — with longest title ever? — retracted for lack of author approval
In a new retraction notice, the Journal of Controlled Release is living up to its name. The editor-in-chief has retracted a study that plagiarized “a large number” of papers, but only three are listed in the notice. Here’s the notice for “In situ-forming hydrogels for sustained ophthalmic drug delivery,” by Basavaraj K. Nanjawade, F.V. Manvi, … Continue reading Study plagiarizes so many other papers, retraction notice can’t list them all