Premature withdrawal can lead to frustration and hurt feelings — especially when it comes to publications (please, this is a family-friendly site). Two cases in point: We recently learned that the International Journal of Surgery, an Elsevier title, had withdrawn two papers from the CONSORT group — an acronym for Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials … Continue reading Penalties for early withdrawal: irked CONSORT Group authors
We have an update on the case of Olav and Axel Gressner, a father-son (or, in this case, son-father) pair of German liver researchers caught up in a fraud investigation. The inquiry focused on Olav, who left the University of Aachen under a cloud of suspicion. A 2008 research letter on which he was a … Continue reading Update on the Gressner case: Son Olav says he’s the unfairly targeted “bête noire”
If a paper appears online but then is withdrawn — a kinder, gentler version of retracted — before it is “officially” published, did anyone hear it fall? Oops, mixed metaphors again. And scare quotes! The latter, however, are because publishers seem to have varying opinions of whether or not something that is freely available online … Continue reading Academic purgatory: Papers withdrawn before they’re “officially” published
Another shoe has dropped in the case of Emily M. Horvath, the Indiana researcher whose tinkering with figures while on a $369,000 federal grant ended in sanctions by government officials. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, an Elsevier title, has retracted another paper on which Horvath was an author, bringing to three the number of her … Continue reading Third retraction for Indiana University scientist who altered figures in NIH-funded research
For would-be plagiarists, now is both the best and worst of times. Thanks to Google and other search tools, never has it been easier to appropriate someone else’s thoughts or words. But the Internet taketh away, too—offering up scads of sleuthing software that promise the ability to sniff out cheats. Which is what makes this … Continue reading Best Of Retractions Part II: Keyword search “Irony” as paper on Google infringement case plagiarized
Although Retraction Watch might have been born just before yesterday, we find it instructive to look back in time for items we would have covered had we been around a bit longer. We’ll do this periodically to generate a “Best Of” collection of retractions that catch our eye both for what they might suggest about … Continue reading Best Of Retractions, Part I: Water, water, everywhere, except in “Historical Palestine,” aka Israel
Work from a prolific father-son team of liver researchers in Germany has come under scrutiny after accusations that they falsified data in a 2009 letter to the editor that appeared in the Journal of Hepatology. The letter, retracted in the September issue (after an online notice in June), referred to a 2008 article in the … Continue reading Liver spots: Hepatology journal yanks research letter on caffeine-fibrosis link, saying authors falsified data