Search Results for: press release

Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper

A tenure-track investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a division of the National Institutes of Health, resigned in March, as questions mounted about her work, Retraction Watch has learned.  Jennifer Martinez has retracted at least two papers, including a 2016 Nature paper with the chair of the immunology department at St. … Continue reading Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper

Company’s Alzheimer’s treatment study earns a flag

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a federally-funded paper on Alzheimer’s disease after a sleuth on PubPeer noted potentially duplicated figures in the article.  We shouldn’t forget to mention, as the paper did, that one of the authors – a prominent scientist who happens also to be a co-editor in chief of … Continue reading Company’s Alzheimer’s treatment study earns a flag

Exclusive: Former associate dean and ‘highly cited researcher’ was demoted by university

A former associate dean for research at the University of Wyoming who was named as one of Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers for 2021 was sanctioned by the university years ago, Retraction Watch has learned. Jun Ren, who studies the heart and diabetes, left Wyoming sometime in 2019 or 2020, according to a press release noting … Continue reading Exclusive: Former associate dean and ‘highly cited researcher’ was demoted by university

Japanese university recommends five retractions after investigating botany researcher

Kyoto University is recommending retraction for five papers by a former botany researcher there after an institutional inquiry turned up evidence of fraud.  The investigation of Lianwei Peng, who left the school in May 2011, found 11 images had been manipulated in the papers, according to a press release. The corresponding author on all five … Continue reading Japanese university recommends five retractions after investigating botany researcher

The Lancet more than doubles its impact factor, eclipsing NEJM for the first time ever

The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than … Continue reading The Lancet more than doubles its impact factor, eclipsing NEJM for the first time ever

NASA researchers retract Nature paper on climate change and evapotranspiration

The authors of a 2021 Nature paper on how climate change might affect the amount of evaporation from the earth’s land surface have retracted the article after learning of a crucial error in their analysis.  The crux of the paper, titled “A 10 per cent increase in global land evapotranspiration from 2003 to 2019,”  was … Continue reading NASA researchers retract Nature paper on climate change and evapotranspiration

Will the real hottest month on record please stand up?

As anyone who follows the climate news is aware, July 2021 was the hottest month on record for our torrid little orb, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with a combined temperature 1.67 degrees F higher than the 20th century average of 60.4 F. NOAA noted in a Friday press release that … Continue reading Will the real hottest month on record please stand up?

Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes

A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles. The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of … Continue reading Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes

Paper linking frequency of Google search terms to violence against women retracted

The findings were, to say the least, shocking: A researcher in New Zealand claimed that Google searches about violence against women soared during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic — raising the prospect that quarantines were leading to a surge in intimate partner violence and similar crimes.  Shocking, yes, but now retracted because the … Continue reading Paper linking frequency of Google search terms to violence against women retracted

Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation

A university in China has revoked the medical degree of a researcher found guilty of having produced his dissertation with the help of a prodigious paper mill.  As Elisabeth Bik noted last year in a post on PubPeer, the thesis by Bin Chen, a lung specialist at Soochow University, was one of 121 articles produced … Continue reading Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation