A postdoc at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation faked data in a submitted paper and in a grant application, according to a new report from the Office of Research Integrity. Bin Kang admitted to the misconduct, in which he
This week at Retraction Watch witnessed the fall of a “golden boy” and a “NASA Patriot Boy.” Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A pair of cell biologists have taken responsibility for extensive figure errors that scuttled their paper in the Journal of Cell Biology. While there were five authors, first and last authors Eva Szabo and Michal Opas took responsibility in the notice. A number of figures “contain incorrect data and/or presentation errors,” and the original data isn’t available … Continue reading Fat cell paper earns unusually detailed retraction
A computer scientist in India has lost a 2013 paper on satellite imaging because he submitted — and published — essentially the same article three times. The researcher, P.V. Arun, came to the attention of the Indian media last year after it emerged that he had lied about winning a post with NASA and other … Continue reading Duplication retraction appears for ‘NASA Patriot Boy’ turned Indian scandal source
Olivier Voinnet, a researcher at ETH in Zurich and the winner of the 2013 Rössler Prize, is correcting a number of papers following critiques of more than a dozen of his studies on PubPeer. The work appears in journals including Cell and PNAS. Voinnet’s co-author on several of the papers, David Baulcombe, who is also … Continue reading Award-winning plant researcher correcting several papers critiqued on PubPeer
Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections:
Retired Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax made a career out of making up papers, many of them on the Bosnian genocide. He retired from the Free University in Amsterdam in 2002. It wasn’t until 2013 that the university published a report indicating that Bax never published 61 of the papers he listed on his CV, and … Continue reading Second retraction appears for Mart Bax
Frontiers in Pharmacology has retracted a paper on baicalin, an antioxidant sold in health food stores, because it had both “incorrect data and invalid statistical analyses.” A comment on PubPeer notes that one of the figures (see image to the right) contains two similar-looking flow cytometry images labeled with different values, which could be what the … Continue reading “Incorrect data” kills apoptosis paper
Piero Anversa, a stem cell researcher at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a colleague, Annarosa Leri, have sued Harvard over an investigation into their work that they claim has cost them millions in a forfeited sale of their company, and job offers. The team has had a paper in Circulation retracted, and a paper in … Continue reading Stem cell researchers sue Harvard, claiming faulty investigation lost them job offers
The stories behind several recent inscrutable retraction notices became a bit more clear today when the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued findings in cases involving former researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Francisco. The ORI found that H. Rosie Xing, a former assistant professor at the University of … Continue reading ORI sanctions former University of Chicago and UCSF scientists for faking findings