The debate over the retraction of a highly controversial paper on the effects of GMOs on rats continues unabated. This week, Adriane Fugh-Berman and Thomas Sherman wrote on the Hastings Center website that
We have a second retraction from a group of neuroscience researchers in Belgium who discovered fatal errors in their work on how the brain sets about the task of reading written language. Spoiler alert: Turns out those errors weren’t errors after all. As we reported back in May, the group, from the University of Leuven, … Continue reading Fraud topples second neuroscience word processing paper
A team of neuroscientists from Sweden has retracted their 2013 paper in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity after discovering that they’d made a mistake while merging their data. According to the abstract, the study, “Lower CSF interleukin-6 predicts future depression in a population-based sample of older women followed for 17 years,” purported to find that:
Researchers have retracted a fourth paper following an investigation at Cardiff University that found evidence of image manipulation by a researcher named Rossen Donev. Here’s the notice for “The mouse complement regulator CD59b is significantly expressed only in testis and plays roles in sperm acrosome activation and motility,” a paper first published in Molecular Immunology … Continue reading Fourth retraction results from Cardiff investigation
We’re a bit late to this, but a Federal court in Massachusetts last fall heard a medical malpractice case with fascinating implications for journals. The case involved allegations by the plaintiffs — two children who had suffered permanent birth defects and their mothers — that they had lost previous malpractice suits because a fraudulent case report … Continue reading Federal court rebuffs request to discredit article that malpractice lawyers want retracted
Earlier this month, we reported on the unexplained withdrawal of a case report from the American Journal of Medicine whose authors said they had treated a man in St. Louis who used krokodil, a homemade mixture of prescription painkillers heroin and flammable contaminants that has proven deadly in Russia. At the time, all the journal’s … Continue reading St. Louis Krokodil paper reappears
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, beginning with a story we broke about faked HIV vaccine results that was picked up by the Des Moines Register and other outlets. Here’s what was happening elsewhere on the web:
Add to the retraction pile for a pair of chemists in Iran who duplicated their work — and reviewed their own articles to boot. The authors, Kobra Pourabdollah and Bahram Mokhtari, are affiliated with the Razi Chemistry Research Center in the Shahreza Branch of Islamic Azad University. In September, we reported on the retractions of … Continue reading More retractions for authors who duplicated — and did their own peer review
Amine Bahi, a neuroscience researcher in the United Arab Emirates, has had a third paper retracted. Here’s the notice for “Blockade of Protein Phosphatase 2B Activity in the Amygdala Increases Anxiety- and Depression-Like Behaviors in Mice,” which was posted on November 19:
It’s really hard to get papers retracted, police might be best-equipped to handle scientific misconduct investigations, and there’s finally software that will identify likely image manipulation. Those are three highlights from a number of pieces that have appeared in Nature and Nature Medicine in the past few weeks. Not surprisingly, there are common threads, so … Continue reading Should scientific misconduct be handled by the police? It’s fraud week at Nature and Nature Medicine