By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Benjamin Bonavida is a prolific science book author and recently retired as UCLA professor. He previously had to retract some papers as others took the blame. Yet Smut Clyde found so many fraudulent works signed by Bonavida that one wonders if this cancer researcher is a victim or rather the perpetrator here.
Irina Stancheva was investigated in Edinburgh for fraud at least twice, in 2009 and 2017, yet retraction and correction decisions were not implemented. Apparently to protect the reputation of Nobel Prize candidate Sir Adrian Bird and his male mentees, primarily Richard Meehan. One wonders: how much of Bird research in past two decades was actually fabricated by Stancheva?
US cancer research professors Paul B Fisher, Paul Dent and Stephen Grant look like the characters of a Joel and Ethan Coen crime movie, unfortunately never filmed. Smut Clyde will give you a peek into their spree of data manipulation
A former Karolinska researcher is subject of research misconduct investigation, for forwarding to university OA publishing bills for her past research there. To save €3k, no trick is too dirty for Karolinska Institutet.
I obtained the full report on the case of Karin Dahlman-Wright, Vice-Rector of the Karolinska Institutet. The investigation by Danish researcher Nils Billestrup for CEPN found 6 out of 8 papers contained data manipulations, but only in 2 cases serious enough to affect the conclusions.
The last act of the Ashutosh Tiwari travesty at Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden took place. Tiwari, the fake professor and master of predatory conferences, tripped only over his vanity of gift co-authorship on 3 papers by his Allahabad mate Prashant Sharma, a shameless nanotechnology data faker with presently 26 retractions.
Two and a half years after Maria Fousteri was found guilty of scientific misconduct by her former employer, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), exactly nothing at all happened. ERC and Molecular Cell ignored LUMC letters from June 2016, while Fouster’s British co-authors interfered to save own papers. Of 4 scheduled retractions, none took place.
The fraud case of Bristol cell biologist Abderrahmane Kaidi looked rather straightforward: Bristol University caught a group leader on data faking and bullying, and immediately had him removed. Turns out, it was not really like that.
Now I publish some very revealing leaked material, spiced with stories of a guerrilla Twitter account and a deleted student newspaper article.
Olivier Voinnet, responsible for probably the biggest fraud scandal in plant sciences, is back in the news. His present employer ETH Zürich has now concluded, in collaboration with CNRS, their second investigation into data manipulations in Voinnet papers. The ETH professor was declared innocent of any data manipulations, in the past, present and even future.
University of Bristol mysteriously lost its senior lecturer, Abderrahmane Kaidi. His institutional website was wiped out in August 2018. I obtained an internal email which lifts the mystery: Kaidi was namely found guilty of “having fabricated research data”, and resigned with “immediate effect”. Affected by research misconduct are also publications from Kaidi’s postdoc period with Stephen Jackson in Cambridge.
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