The week at Retraction Watch featured commentary on yet another paper claiming a link between autism and vaccines, a welcome useful retraction notice, and a rewrite of a paper that influenced car seat guidelines. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A Canadian doctor with nine retractions due to misconduct has lost a court case seeking payment for an expert medical exam he performed in August 2014. The exam took place several months after his university found he had allowed a breach of research integrity in his lab and a month before news of the investigation … Continue reading Doctor with 9 retractions loses lawsuit over work as expert witness
Retraction Watch readers may be forgiven for thinking that there has been at least a small uptick in the papers that claim to link autism and vaccines, and yet tend to raise more questions than they answer. Sometimes, they are retracted. See here, here and here, for example. We talk to David Gorski, well known … Continue reading “Utterly awful:” David Gorski weighs in on yet another paper linking vaccines and autism
It’s clear science has a reproducibility problem. What’s less clear is how to address it. Recently, the U.S. National Institutes of Health awarded the Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) $2.34 million to train students in good experimental design (also covered by The Scientist). The first week begins June 2018 at Harvard Medical School. We spoke … Continue reading Lesson one: How to design a good experiment
A former graduate student falsified or fabricated data in a manuscript submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, according to the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In a finding released Dec. 8, ORI said that Matthew Endo, a former graduate student at the University … Continue reading ORI: Ex-grad student “falsified and/or fabricated” data in PNAS submission
Last year, a professor brought a suit against his former university after it forced him to retire. Now, he’s adding defamation to his list of allegations. In a lawsuit filed July 14, 2016, Ishwarlal “Kenny” Jialal, a cardiovascular researcher who worked at the University of California, Davis Medical Center from 2002 to 2016, alleges the … Continue reading Professor sues UC Davis over forced retirement following misconduct inquiry
As a bone researcher continues to accrue retractions, an investigation at his former university has found misconduct in more than a dozen papers. On Nov. 15, Japan’s Hirosaki University announced it had identified fabrication and authorship issues in 13 papers by Yoshihiro Sato, and plagiarism in another. Sato, a professor at Hirosaki University Medical School … Continue reading University investigation finds misconduct by bone researcher with 23 retractions
The week at Retraction Watch featured a call to make peer reviews public, lots of news about Cornell food researcher Brian Wansink, and a request by the U.S. NIH that the researchers it funds don’t publish in bad journals. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has noticed something: More of the research it’s funding is ending up in questionable journals. Recently, the agency issued a statement highlighting some qualities of these journals — aggressively soliciting submissions, failing to provide clear information about pricing — and urging researchers to avoid them. The NIH’s goal: to … Continue reading NIH to researchers: Don’t publish in bad journals, please
A researcher specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder is facing jail time for allegedly embezzling tens of thousands of dollars of federal grant money. Yesterday, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced criminal charges against Alexander Neumeister, … Continue reading New York psychiatry researcher charged with embezzlement, faces jail time