Last month, Ranjit Kumar Chandra was denied an extension to file an appeal of his lawsuit against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). It seemed to mark the end of a long fall for the self-proclaimed “father of nutritional immunology,” who has ended up with multiple high-profile retractions and on the wrong end of a costly libel … Continue reading Who is Ranjit Kumar Chandra? A timeline of notoriety
The week at Retraction Watch featured a first in transparency from Canada, and the second retraction for a fan of a conspiracy theory. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A journal is retracting three papers and a letter from a bone researcher who admitted to scientific misconduct, noting that all co-authors were included only for honorary reasons. We’ve previously reported on six retractions of papers co-authored by Yoshihiro Sato, who is based at Mitate Hospital in Japan, including one in JAMA. Retractions stemmed from the … Continue reading Bone researcher up to 10 retractions
A former postdoctoral researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has received a five-year funding ban after an investigation concluded that they had falsified data underlying more than 50 images. According to a report released today by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), Zhiyu Li falsified
If you’ve searched recently for retracted articles in PubMed — the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s database of scientific abstracts — you may have noticed something new. In fact, you may have had trouble ignoring it, which is sort of the point. “It” is a large salmon banner that looks something like this:
An autism researcher is retracting a paper she shared with the director of a New York institute, following a misconduct investigation. In 2011, suspicions raised by peer reviewers triggered the investigation into several papers by Xiaohong Li at the Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities (IBR) in New York. The probe concluded in 2013 that there was no evidence … Continue reading Institute director loses third paper following investigation
A contentious case over whether a fired ecologist deserves whistleblower protection is playing out in Kansas, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has once again weighed in. For the second time, the NSF has told the researcher, Joseph Craine, that he does not qualify for protection as a whistleblower after he was fired from Kansas … Continue reading War over whistleblower protection for Kansas ecology prof wages on
A graduate student at McGill University is raising concerns that a popular F1000Research paper may have plagiarized his 2014 blog post that — ironically — proposed a method to prevent scientific misconduct. The student calls the paper “a mirror image” of his work. The February 2016 F1000Research paper, “How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science,” was highlighted … Continue reading Plagiarism concerns raised over popular blockchain paper on catching misconduct
Two researchers found to have faked data by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) have lost a paper that they co-authored. According to the ORI report issued on May 25, Ricky Malhotra, one of the researchers in question, admitted to fabricating 74 experiments, and falsifying well over 100 Western blots while at the Universities of Michigan (UM) … Continue reading Second retraction for researcher who faked 70+ experiments
After a prominent researcher was dismissed due to multiple instances of misconduct in his studies, how are journals responding? When an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found multiple issues with the work of psychiatry researcher Alexander Neumeister, New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center shut down eight of his studies. (Disclosure: The author … Continue reading A prominent psychiatry researcher is dismissed. What’s happening to his papers?