#ivan oransky

In July, the publisher SAGE retracted 60 articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control after an investigation revealed a “peer review and citation ring” in which at least one professor in Taiwan, Peter Chen, allegedly assumed false identities to promote his own work.

A former researcher at Iowa State University (ISU) spiked rabbit blood samples with human blood to make it look as though his HIV vaccine was working. Dong-Pyou Han is now facing criminal charges, and ISU was forced to pay back nearly $500,000 of his salary—both rare events.

It would be difficult to chronicle 2014’s key retractions without noting the two STAP stem cell paper retractions from Nature. Readers detected significant problems with the research, and Haruko Obokata, who led the studies, was ultimately unable to replicate the findings. Nature has defended its decision to publish the articles, saying editors couldn’t have detected the errors. Science, however, had earlier rejected one of the manuscripts for being too flawed to publish. One of Obokata’s colleagues, Yoshiki Sasai, was not responsible for any misconduct, but committed suicide following the scandal.

In 2010, on a nerdish whim, Ivan Oransky — a medical editor and physician — co-founded the website Retraction Watch with his journalist friend, Adam Marcus. The plan was simple: they'd start tracking all the retractions that were announced at scientific journals. At the time, retractions were not exactly well promoted and no one else was methodically shining a light on research that turned out to be bogus. Retraction notices quietly languished in databases that no one read, making fraudulent or erroneous studies difficult to spot.

Cancer testing - yes or no? Either way, let's screen out the fear

As they worked through the list, SAGE investigators realized that authors were both reviewing and citing each other at an anomalous rate. Eventually, 60 articles were found to have evidence of peer-review tampering, involvement in the citation ring or both. “Due to the serious nature of the findings, we wanted to ensure we had researched all avenues as carefully as possible before contacting any of the authors and reviewers,” says Gamboa. When the dust had settled, it turned out that there was one author in the centre of the ring: Peter Chen, an engineer then at the National Pingtung University of Education (NPUE) in Taiwan, who was a co-author on practically all of the papers in question. After “a series of unsatisfactory responses” from Chen, says Gamboa, SAGE contacted the NPUE, which joined the investigation into Chen's work. Chen resigned from his post in February 2014.

Could Nature's 2-year torrent of paper retractions be a good thing?