Could the sequester mean more business for Retraction Watch?

Consider this a bit of a thought experiment, but hear us out.

The National Institutes of Health earlier this month notified the scientists it funds that, thanks to the sequester, many may soon face cuts in those grants as the agency tries to deal with a reduction in its $30.9 billion budget. In her March 4 letter to grantees, NIH’s Sally Rockey, deputy director for extramural research, wrote:

At this time, the Department of Health and Human Services and NIH are taking every step to mitigate the effects of these cuts, but based on our initial analysis, it is possible that your grants or cooperative agreement awards may be affected.  Examples of this impact could include: not issuing continuation awards, or negotiating a reduction in the scope of your awards to meet the constraints imposed by sequestration.  Additionally, plans for new grants or cooperative agreements may be re-scoped, delayed, or canceled depending on the nature of the work and the availability of resources.

Not in my journal: Two editors take stock of misconduct in their fields — and don’t find much

Today brings two journal editorials about misconduct and retractions. They take, if we may, a bit of an optimistic and perhaps even blindered approach.

In an editorial titled “Scientific misconduct occurs, but is rare,” Boston University’s Richard Primack, editor of Biological Conservation, highlights a Corrigendum of a paper by Jesus Angel Lemus, the veterinary researcher who has retracted seven papers:

Plague paper partially retracted

Partial retractions — as opposed corrections or the full monty —  are unusual events in scientific publishing. But they appear to come in twos.

The journal Infection and Immunity, the work of whose editor, Ferric Fang, is much admired by this blog, has a fascinating example of the breed in its February issue.

The article in question, by a group from the University of Kentucky in Lexington led by Susan Straley, appeared online in 2007. It was titled “yadBC of Yersinia pestis, a New Virulence Determinant for Bubonic Plague,” and, as the words suggest, involved a gene marker for the virulence of plague. Or so it initially seemed.

But according to the partial retraction, the researchers are walking back one of their main claims. Consider:

Are men more likely to commit scientific fraud?

Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that many of the people whose fraud we write about are men. Certainly, the top retraction earners — Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Naoki Mori, to name a few — all have a Y chromosome. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our sample size is representative.

Now along comes a study of U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) reports suggesting that men are in fact overrepresented among scientists who commit fraud. In a study published online today in mBio, Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall — whose names will also be familiar to Retraction Watch readers for their previous work — along with Joan Bennett analyzed 228 ORI reports since 1994, and found that 149 — or 65% — were male. (The vast majority of the 228 cases — 94% — involved fraud such as falsification or fabrication, while the others presumably involved misconduct such as plagiarism.)

And it’s not just that there are more men in the life sciences. At every stage of a life science career, the percentage of males found by the ORI to have committed misconduct was higher than the percentage of male life scientists overall:

Catching up: OSU “missed fraud,” Dipak Das lost tenured professorship, Ivan on NPR’s Science Friday

Terry Elton, via OSU

We have a few follow-ups from stories we’ve recently covered:

Terry Elton case initially chalked up to “disorganization,” not misconduct

Ohio State University (OSU), which along with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) recently sanctioned a pharmacy professor for image manipulation, “failed at first to recognize his deception,” according to an investigation by The Columbus Dispatch based on university documents.

The piece, which quotes Ivan, reveals that OSU needed some prompting from the ORI before it concluded that Terry Elton was guilty of misconduct, and not just unintentional errors that he at one point blamed on a research technician who lost her job in October 2011:

JBC publisher ASBMB hiring manager of publication ethics — and why Retraction Watch is cheering

We’re not generally — or ever — in the habit of running job ads here on Retraction Watch. But the purpose of this post is to highlight a new position available at the American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB) that we think is a great opportunity and a step forward for the society.

As regular Retraction Watch readers know, we frequently beat up on one of the ASBMB’s journals, the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), for publishing retraction notices that say simply “This article has been withdrawn by the authors.” We’re not the only ones; Ferric Fang and colleagues name-checked the journal’s policy when they wrote about factors that

Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study

October, apparently, is “studies of retractions month.” First there was a groundbreaking study in PNAS, then an NBER working paper, and yesterday PLoS Medicine alerted us to a paper their sister journal, PLoS ONE, published last week, “A Comprehensive Survey of Retracted Articles from the Scholarly Literature.”

The study, by Michael L. Grieneisen and Minghua Zhang, is comprehensive indeed, reaching further back into the literature than others we’ve seen, and also including more disciplines:

Majority of retractions are due to misconduct: Study confirms opaque notices distort the scientific record

A new study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today finds that two-thirds of retractions are because of some form of misconduct — a figure that’s higher than previously thought, thanks to unhelpful retraction notices that cause us to beat our heads against the wall here at Retraction Watch.

The study of 2,047 retractions in biomedical and life-science research articles in PubMed from 1973 until May 3, 2012 brings together three retraction researchers whose names may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers: Ferric Fang, Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall. Fang and Casadevall have published together, including on their Retraction Index, but this is the first paper by the trio.

The paper is

How can institutions prevent scientific misconduct?

There has been plenty of interest in scientific fraud and misconduct lately — and not just on Retraction Watch — from major news outlets and government agencies, among other parties. The rate of retractions is increasing, and some fraudsters are even setting new records. That has focused attention on how institutions can prevent misconduct — not something anyone thinks is easy to do.

To try to figure it out, Columbia University’s Donald Kornfeld decided to review 146 U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) cases from 1992 to 2003, “based on 50 years of clinical experience in psychiatry and 19 years as the chairman of two institutional review boards.” (Of note, these only represent cases in which ORI concluded there was misconduct, as the agency doesn’t report on negative cases.) Here’s what he found, reported last month in Academic Medicine:

Journal retracts protein paper from scientist who misused deceased mentor’s data

It seemed like a touching tribute when Jiasheng Diao dedicated his 2009 article, “Crystal Structure of Butyrate Kinase 2 from Thermotoga maritima, a Member of the ASKHA Superfamily of Phosphotransferases,” in the Journal of Bacteriology to a deceased mentor, Miriam Hasson.

Before her death in January 2006, of a brain tumor, Hasson and her husband, David Sanders, made up a power-team of protein researchers at Purdue.

Hasson was an X-ray crystallographer while Sanders is a biochemist, and together they would map out the structure and function of proteins. One of their projects  was a  collaboration funded by a grant to Sanders from the National Science Foundation. By the time Diao joined, the effort had already led to butyrate-kinase crystals — albeit of poor quality, Sanders said.

When Hasson died, Sanders — with his institution’s blessing — took control of her data. That made sense, since their labs had collaborated closely. Indeed, they occasionally shared post-docs, including Diao, who had started with Hasson on a project looking at a protein called butyrate kinase but then moved over to Sanders’ lab as the work evolved.