German institute sanctions director after finding him guilty of misconduct

The executive board of the Leibniz Association in Germany has reprimanded the director of its institute on aging for “grossly negligent scientific misconduct.” Besides a written reprimand, the executive board has removed Karl Lenhard Rudolph’s “passive voting rights” in association committees, and excluded the institute under his leadership from receiving funds from a multi-million Euro internal […]

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Drug researcher up to ten retractions

A pharmaceutical researcher has received his tenth retraction. The reason, once again: duplicating his previous work. Giuseppe Derosa, based at the University of Pavia in Italy, lost a 2011 paper this month after journal editors identified “substantial duplication of an earlier published paper.” According to the notice, the authors failed to cite the previous work and to disclose that the […]

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Biologist critiques own paper, journal retracts it — against her wishes

The journal Evolution has retracted a 2007 paper about the roles of the different sexes in searching for mates, after the same author critiqued the work in a later paper.  The case raises important questions about when retractions are appropriate, and whether they can have a chilling effect on scientific discourse. Although Hanna Kokko of the University […]

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Four retractions follow Swedish government findings of negligence, dishonesty

A Swedish ethical review board has censured two biologists and their employer, Uppsala University, for events related to “extensive image manipulations” in five papers published between 2010 and 2014. The case has led to criticism from an outside expert — who brought the allegations to Uppsala — over the current system in Sweden for handling […]

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Is an increase in retractions good news? Maybe, suggests new study

In Latin America, retractions for plagiarism and other issues have increased markedly — which may be a positive sign that editors and authors are paying closer attention to publishing ethics, according to a small study published in Science and Engineering Ethics. The authors examined two major Latin American/Caribbean databases, which mostly include journals from Brazil, and have been indexing […]

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We’re wasting a lot of research funding using the wrong cell lines. Here’s one thing we can do.

If you could help reduce the waste of tens of billions of dollars per year in research spending, you’d do it, right? This is the second in a series of two guest posts about the havoc misidentified cell lines can wreak on research, from Leonard P. Freedman, president of the Global Biological Standards Institute. Freedman who […]

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Hundreds of researchers are using the wrong cells. That’s a major problem.

What if we told you that approximately 1 in 6 researchers working with human cells are using the wrong cell line? In other words, they believe they are studying the effects of a drug on breast cancer cells, for instance, but what they really have are cells from the bladder. That is the unfortunate reality […]

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“We copied verbatim”: Authors insist on retraction for their own spider paper

The authors of a 2015 paper about non-native spider populations in Chile are retracting it from the Journal of Arachnology because they copied the introduction of a 2011 paper verbatim. The retraction was triggered by the first author, who “insisted on a full retraction in lieu of milder remedies,” according to the journal’s editor-in-chief. The […]

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Curi-us: Author whose lawyers threatened Science Fraud corrects a paper the site criticized

curi

Rui Curi

A few weeks ago, we reported on the shutdown of Science-Fraud.org, a site dedicated to highlighting problems with scientific papers, thanks to legal threats. At the same time, we noted that Rui Curi, one of the authors whose work had been questioned — and whose lawyers had sent the site a cease-and-desist letter — ended up retracting a paper the site had questioned.

Now, Curi has corrected another paper that featured on Science-Fraud.org. Here’s the notice: for “Comparative toxicity of oleic and linoleic acid on human lymphocytes,” which was originally published in Life Science in 2006:

After the publication of this manuscript we found a mistake in Fig. 3. The same image was used for human lymphocytes treated with 100 μM of oleic acid and linoleic acid for 24 h. The representative images have been replaced. The legends, results, discussion and conclusions remain as in the original article. Please, accept our apologies and refer to the correct corresponding Fig. 3 that we provide in this corrigendum.

curi image

Fig. 3. Effects of oleic or linoleic acids on chromatin condensation. Human lymphocytes were stained with Hoechst 33342 and incubated for 10 min at room temperature in the dark to visualize DNA after treatment for 24 h with 100 and 200 μM of oleic or linoleic acid. Cells were examined by fluorescence microscopy for determination of chromatin condensation using a 365/80 nm filter.

The paper has been cited 39 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’ve contacted Curi to find out whether he had any other corrections or retractions planned, and will update with anything we learn.