A psychology professor has lost a paper for failing to disclose a crucial conflict of interest about one of the subjects of the work, which critiqued various blogs.
That’s because one of those blogs was written by none other than the author of the paper, Peter Kinderman, a professor at the University of Liverpool and a former president of the British Psychological Society.
The paper’s comments about Kinderman’s Blog ‘F’ were generally positive, with phrases such as:
A kidney researcher and former dean of a medical school has now had six papers retracted and one marked with an expression of concern in a little more than a year.
The latest retraction for Joseph I. Shapiro, of a 2015 paper in Science Advances, comes two years after PubPeer commenters began posting about potentially duplicated images in the article, and one year after the authors corrected two of its figures.
Shapiro, the corresponding author on the article, stepped down as dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., on June 30th of this year, but remains a tenured professor at the institution. Neither he nor Komal Sodhi, the first author on the article and also of Marshall, have responded to our request for comment.
Retractions of work Shapiro led began last September, according to our database, following critical comments on PubPeer.
In his career as a psychologist, Andrew Colman had only experienced being plagiarized once: In the early 1970s, an acquaintance tried to take credit in print for a psychometric scale that Colman had developed. Colman wrote to the journal, which quickly confirmed the plagiarism and printed a corrigendum in the next issue.
And in the past year, Colman has learned of two more instances of his work – a 2004 paper on game theory in medical consultation – being stolen. He isn’t finding the journals so responsive this time around.
Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues.
Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted.
A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.
Russell Warne
The recent retraction came through the efforts of psychologist Russell Warne, who unearthed the report with the help of a couple librarians, posted it on his blog, and contacted journals about its findings.
In a blog post about the report, Warne summed up the case:
A business professor has now had six papers retracted, resulting from a combination of plagiarism and manipulated peer review.
All six retractions for Bilal Afsar, an associate professor of management sciences at Hazara University in Pakistan, have come since last February. He is the only common author on all the papers, which were published in 2019 and 2020 – and in comments to Retraction Watch, blamed a research assistant whom he declined to name for the problems.
Last week, we wrote about the story of Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam who had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. The paper would end up retracted. At the time, Lodder had not had a chance to respond to our questions about the case. We’re pleased to share his comments as a guest post.
I’ve had a big passion for research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics ever since I had started my undergraduate in biomedical sciences at Amsterdam University College. I am currently a MSc Artificial Intelligence student and about a year ago, in preparation for a computational neuroscience course, I wanted to expand on the model used by Rubén.
I sent him an e-mail explaining the situation, and requesting some parameters that weren’t detailed in the paper so that I could start running the simulations myself. Rubén responded very quickly and was immediately very helpful with getting me started with running the simulations.
Now that I was able to run the model properly, I wanted to start off with being able to reproduce the paper’s analysis results before looking into expanding. Using the methodology described in the paper, I re-implemented the steps needed to compute the entropy. And indeed, this is where I got some different results as presented in the paper.
A prominent sports medicine researcher who earlier this year had an editorial from his time as the top editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted for plagiarism has lost nine more articles for stealing and recycling text and misrepresenting a reference.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine has also placed expressions of concern on all other articles on which Paul McCrory, who was the journal’s editor-in-chief from 2001-2008, is the sole author, totalling 38 articles, according to a press release from the journal. (We count 78 single author papers for McCrory in BJSM.)
McCrory is a widely cited expert on concussions, and has worked with major sporting agencies and leagues as a consultant.
