It’s unusual for us to post obituaries on Retraction Watch — we’ve published just one so far in three-and-a-half years — but we wanted to pause for a moment to note the passing of a tireless crusader for transparency and accountability whose electronic path crossed with ours a number of times since 2012 because of … Continue reading RIP, Ed Rickards: Duke watchdog who covered Anil Potti case dies at 72
We have an update on the case of Pankaj Dhonukshe, a scientist about whom we reported in November. Utrecht University has found that Dhonukshe, a former researcher at the Dutch university, committed “a violation of academic integrity” in work that led to a number of papers, including one published in Nature and once since retracted … Continue reading Utrecht University finds “violation of academic integrity” by former researcher
The Journal of Asian Earth Sciences has retracted a 2004 article by a scholar in India who resused text from a previous work on which he was a co-author. The article, “Finite strain and deformation from a refolded region of the Dudatoli-Almora Crystalline, Kumaun Lesser Himalaya,” was written by Hari B. Srivastava, of Banaras Hindu … Continue reading Paper on refolded mountain range a reproduction, now retracted
About three years ago, we brought Retraction Watch readers news of our new favorite journal, the Journal of Universal Rejection. In a post titled “No retractions necessary” that featured an interview with the editor, Caleb Emmons, we quoted the journal: The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That … Continue reading Coming soon to a city nowhere near you: The Conference of Universal Rejection
A team of physicists has lost their 2013 paper in the Journal of Optics after the publisher learned that the article had already appeared in print twice before. The article, “Inscription of narrow bandwidth Bragg gratings in polymer optical fibers,” came from researchers at the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, in Portugal, and the Aston Institute of … Continue reading Seeing triple: Optics paper proves to be one of three, retracted
Cell Metabolism has retracted a 2006 article by a group of researchers at Oxford in England after an investigation concluded that the first author had committed misconduct. The paper, “Nicotinamide nucleotide transhydrogenase: A key role in insulin secretion,” came from the lab of Frances Ashcroft, a world-renowned expert on ion channels. (We’ve written about Ashcroft’s … Continue reading Misconduct at Oxford prompts retraction of insulin paper
The Journal of Food Science has retracted a 2012 paper by Chinese scientists, one of whom copped to having made up data in the paper — which also plagiarized from a 2009 article by other researchers — and forging his co-authors’ names on the manuscript. The article, “A Multiplex PCR Assay for the Rapid and … Continue reading 2 for 2: Fraud, plagiarism force retraction of Staph aureus paper
There were lots of pieces about scientific misconduct, publishing, and related issues posted around the web this week, so without further ado:
A former postdoc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) committed misconduct in a study of hepatitis by falsely claiming that data from a single trial subject were actually from more than a dozen different people, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has found. The investigation was prompted by allegations made by readers of the … Continue reading Former NIH scientist falsified images in hepatitis study: ORI
In the midst of the holiday season, it’s a pleasure to be able to share the story of a scientist doing the right thing at significant professional cost — especially a researcher in psychology, a field that has been battered lately by scandal. Sometime after publishing two papers — one in Developmental Science and another … Continue reading Doing the right thing: Yale psychology lab retracts monkey papers for inaccurate coding