Category: Large problematic paper sets

All that glitters is not gold

This blog post is not an accusation of misconduct, and reflects my personal opinion.

This paper has it all. The authors are from Stanford University’s School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School. It was published in 2002 in Nature Medicine, and has been cited over 900 times, as per Google Scholar. It even received a prestigious F1000 Recommendation. And it was supported by six NIH grants. 

Akbari O et al. Antigen-specific regulatory T cells develop via the ICOS–ICOS-ligand pathway and inhibit allergen-induced airway hyperreactivity. Nature Medicine 8(9), September 2002. DOI: 10.1038/nm745.
It glitters. But is it gold? Photo by Lucas Benjamin on Unsplash

But all that glitters is not gold. Let’s take a look at some of the flow cytometry images in this paper.

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Concerns about a top immunology lab

This post is not an accusation of misconduct.

Five years ago, in 2014, I reported three papers from the same lab with possible image duplications to the journals in which they had been published. One of these papers has since then been corrected – although I argued in a previous post about this paper that a retraction might have been a better decision. The other two papers are still untouched, unfortunately.

Since the journals and authors had had 5 years to respond, I posted my concerns about these three papers on PubPeer, so that at least researchers with the PubPeer extension can see that they have been “flagged”. I also found a couple more papers from this lab – headed by Dr. Xuetao Cao – that appeared to have problems and I posted these as well.

And then someone pointed out that the senior author on these papers was one of the top immunologists in China.

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More troubles at Annamalai University

This blog post expresses my personal opinion. It is not an accusation of misconduct.

In my last post, I wrote about a large set of around 200 problematic papers, all from research groups at Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, India.

There are two additional problem sets.

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Concerns about papers from Annamalai University

This blog post expresses my personal opinion. It is not an accusation of misconduct.

Annamalai University

Annamalai (often spelled “Annaamalai”) is the name of an Indian hit-movie from 1992. It is also the name of a state university in Tamil Nadu, a state in the South of India.

Annamalai University Logo with its motto “With Courage And Faith”

Annamalai University was founded in 1929 (celebrating its 90th Anniversary this year) by Rajah Sir S. R. M. Annamalai Chettiar, and is ranked in 801-1000 in the world by The Times Higher Education.

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