The week at Retraction Watch featured revelations about a cancer researcher in Canada and an author’s worst nightmare come true. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
“Deeply disturbing,” “heinous intellectual theft,” erosion of the “public’s trust in medical research:” These are just a few words used to describe a rare type of plagiarism reported in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine. Although we’ve only documented a few cases where peer reviewers steal material from manuscripts and pass them off as their … Continue reading Dear peer reviewer, you stole my paper: An author’s worst nightmare
An entomology journal has issued its first retraction during the current editor’s nearly 30-year tenure — for a 2016 study with serious flaws in the analyses. After the Journal of Medical Entomology (JME) published the study — about the identification of genes that enable an insect to detect odors — an outside researcher wrote a letter to the … Continue reading Entomology journal retracts 2016 study with flawed analyses
The week at Retraction Watch featured a refreshingly honest retraction, and a big win for PubPeer. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A journal posted an abstract online suggesting a link between vaccines and autism. After a firestorm of criticism, it removed the abstract, saying it was going to be re-reviewed. Now, the journal has decided to formally reject it. As we reported last month, Frontiers in Public Health removed the abstract after it sparked criticism on … Continue reading Journal reverses acceptance of study linking vaccines to autism
The authors of a 2015 study have retracted it after discovering that several Western blots in their paper “do not represent the experiments that were reported.” They couldn’t check some of the original blots, because — according to the retraction notice in the American Journal of Physiology – Renal Physiology — they could not be located. … Continue reading A paper was published in 2015; the authors already lost the data
When an ecologist realized he’d made a fatal error in a 2009 paper, he did the right thing: He immediately contacted the journal (Evolutionary Ecology Research) to ask for a retraction. But he didn’t stop there: He wrote a detailed blog post outlining how he learned — in October 2016, after a colleague couldn’t recreate … Continue reading “A sinking feeling in my gut:” Diary of a retraction
Two remaining charges against a Parkinson’s researcher recently convicted of fraud have been dropped by an Australian court. In October, Caroline Barwood, formerly at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, was found guilty of five out of seven charges. Subsequently, Barwood was handed two suspended sentences: one for two years, and another for 15 months, both … Continue reading Remaining fraud charges withdrawn for Parkinson’s researcher
Drumroll please. The tally of retractions in MEDLINE — one of the world’s largest databases of scientific abstracts — for the last fiscal year has just been released, and the number is: 664. Earlier this year, we scratched our heads over the data from 2015, which showed retractions had risen dramatically, to 684. The figures for … Continue reading Retractions holding steady at more than 650 in FY2016
This week at Retraction Watch featured some big numbers: How a request to correct a single paper turned into 19 retractions, and 18 tips for giving horrible presentations. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: