Nature paper adds non-reproducibility to its list of woes

Despite taking some serious hits, a 2006 letter in Nature isn’t going anywhere. Years ago, a university committee determined that two figures in the letter had been falsified. The journal chose to correct the paper, rather than retract it — and then, the next year, published a correction of that correction due to “an error […]

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Journal editor resigns over firestorm from circumcision article

Circumcision is a hot topic. So hot, questions about a reviewer’s potential conflict with the author of an article promoting circumcision prompted a journal editor to resign, and one academic to call another a “fanatic.” It began in August, when Brian Morris, professor emeritus of molecular medicine at the University of Sydney, published a critique […]

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One in 25 papers contains inappropriately duplicated images, screen finds

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist at Stanford, has for years been a behind-the-scenes force in scientific integrity, anonymously submitting reports on plagiarism and image duplication to journal editors. Now, she’s ready to come out of the shadows. With the help of two editors at microbiology journals, she has conducted a massive study looking for image duplication […]

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Chip slip: Irreproducibility erases computer memory paper

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have retracted a paper in Nanoscale about an experimental computer chip after they were unable to recreate their published results. “We retract this article to avoid misleading readers and intend to undertake further tests to confirm our previous results,” they write in the notice. The scientists are working […]

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Reporting errors sink chem paper on liquid-liquid equilibrium

A team of chemists at Hunan University and Zhejiang Shuyang Chemical Company in China have retracted a paper from the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data after “inconsistencies with the literature” led them to discover “errors” in the way the data were reported. According to the corresponding author Qinbo Wang, in December 2014, Robert Chirico, an associate editor at […]

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Data theft, bad authors list, and hidden funding sink mol bio paper

A Chinese researcher has lost a paper after the journal discovered he published others’ research without permission and lied about the grant funding he used for the work. Yihang Shen published a paper using his PhD research on the molecular biology of fetal rodent livers earlier this year in DNA and Cell Biology. Unfortunately, he didn’t have permission to […]

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Skeleton crew’s second paper broken over methodology issues; more retractions to appear

Bone researcher Olga Panagiotopoulou of the University of Queensland has lost a second paper over “errors in the validation protocol and data.” The retracted paper in the Journal of Biomechanics, about primate jaws, was subject to an expression of concern in May 2014 November 2013, one of two Panagiotopoulou’s group issued last year over methodological problems. The other […]

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Biology team with two retractions now correcting references to nixed papers

A team of biologists that retracted two papers after being “unable to replicate some of the results obtained by the first author of the paper” has now issued a correction to fix references to the two sunk publications. The corrected paper is a review in the Journal of Virology — known there as a Gem — […]

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Former postdoc suing lab head for publishing paper he says he wrote, without his name

A pharmaceutical researcher is suing his postdoctoral advisor and former business partner, accusing him of publishing a paper in PLoS Biology they wrote together, and removing him as an author. According to the complaint, Andrew Mallon and John Marshall co-founded a company, Ardane Therapeutic, to commercialize a potential therapy that Mallon discovered for Angelman Sydrome, a […]

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Cancer team loses two papers for image manipulation

A team spread across multiple institutions in China and McGill University in Canada has retracted two cancer papers over “inaccurate and inappropriately processed Western Blots.” Some of the figures were also reused between the two articles, both in Biochimica et Biophysica Acta General Subjects. The articles both tested the cancer-fighting properties of a derivative of […]

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