Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
A biologist at the University of Georgia has lost a paper after an investigation revealed she had tampered with three images. In 2014, Azza El-Remessy notched three retractions for a series of image errors. Now, a fourth retraction notice, and an expression of concern, explain there has been an investigation into her work. The investigation — conducted by two […]
The post Eye researcher loses fourth paper for misconduct following Georgia, VA investigation appeared first on Retraction Watch.
An author who claimed that he accidentally plagiarized material in a retracted paper has lost two more — again, for plagiarism. Earlier this year, we shared a 900-word statement in which Christopher S. Collins at Azusa Pacific University explained he unintentionally plagiarized a paper by taking notes on it — including writing down whole sentences — and using them in his own […]
The post Can you plagiarize by mistake? In three papers? appeared first on Retraction Watch.
A researcher in New Mexico has retracted three papers tainted by fraud. Lead author Samuel Lee, who works at the New Mexico Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare System and the University of New Mexico (UNM), requested Eukaryotic Cell retract two papers after identifying multiple instances of fabricated or falsified data. He requested the retraction of a review article based […]
The post Gov’t researchers lose three papers for data doctoring appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Does an article that discusses anonymized student projects about how to catalog data count as research on human subjects? One of the students included in the paper thought so, and complained to the journal after learning that it had published the case study of the program without the approval required for studying people. The authors admitted […]
The post Does your work need IRB approval? Better check, says author of retracted paper appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Consider this: Fragments of a PLOS ONE paper overlap with pieces of other publications. The authors used them without credit and without quotation marks. This sounds an awful lot like plagiarism — using PLOS‘s own standards, even. But the journal isn’t calling it plagiarism. They’ve labeled this an instance of “text overlap,” a spokesperson told us, based […]
The post When does “overlap” become plagiarism? Here’s what PLOS ONE decided appeared first on Retraction Watch.
A group has retracted one paper and corrected another in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) for image manipulations. Last author José G. Castaño told us the manipulation occurred at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he and one other co-author are based. He declined to name who was responsible. Here’s the retraction notice for “Cytomegalovirus promoter up-regulation is the major cause […]
The post Spanish lab admits to image manipulation, retracts one paper, corrects another appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Note to self: If you’re going to duplicate your own work, don’t copy from papers that plagiarize others’ research. Just such a mistake has cost a PhD candidate three papers — although his co-author argues that a company is in part to blame. Hossein Jafarzadeh, who is studying mechanical engineering at the University of Tehran, apparently asked a […]
The post A plagiarism loop: Authors copied from papers that had copied from others appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Sometimes, the best way to expose a problem with the publishing process is to put it to a test — perhaps by performing a Sokal-style hoax, or submitting a paper with obvious flaws. In 2014, that’s just what a researcher in Kosovo did. Suspicious that a journal wasn’t doing a thorough job of vetting submissions, she decided to […]
The post Sting operation forces predatory publisher to pull paper appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Here’s a strange one: We discovered a paper about an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria that bore two retraction notices, and each provided a different reason for retraction. One alleged misconduct; that notice still appears now. The other — which has since disappeared — said the paper was submitted by mistake. “In vitro effect of boric acid and calcium […]
The post A tale of two retraction notices — for the same paper appeared first on Retraction Watch.
A cluster of papers by different authors has been retracted for sharing text, even though some papers were submitted at the same time. How is that possible? A spokesperson for Springer told us that they have reason to believe a third-party company may have helped prepare the papers for publication, and in the process might have spread […]
The post A retraction cluster? Two papers retracted for overlap with other retractions appeared first on Retraction Watch.