Ferric Fang

Last updated

Ferric C. Fang is an American microbiologist. He is a Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Pathology, and Microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, as well as the director of the Harborview Medical Center's Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. [1] Prior to joining the University of Washington in 2001, he taught at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. [2] From 2007 to 2017, he was the editor-in-chief of Infection and Immunity , and he was the deputy editor of Clinical Infectious Diseases from 2016 to 2021. [3] He is currently an editor of Clinical Microbiology Reviews. He has been a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation since 1998, as well as an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [4]

Contents

Biography

Fang grew up in Los Angeles, California, the son of a doctor. He attended Harvard University, where he received his A.B. in biology in 1979; he went on to receive his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1983. [5] [6]

Research

Fang's research interests include studying the antimicrobial activity of reactive nitrogen and oxygen species against Salmonella enterica and Staphylococcus aureus . His laboratory also discovered the process of xenogeneic silencing, whereby bacteria incorporate foreign DNA into regulatory pathways. [1] He became interested in studying scientific retractions after he retracted six papers that had been published in Infection and Immunity. He subsequently began studying the subject in more detail with another of the journal's editors, Arturo Casadevall. They published a paper on the subject in 2011, in which they coined the term "retraction index". [7] He has also catalogued the incidence of scientific fraud, and published a study in 2012 finding that such fraud has become increasingly common in recent years. [8] [9] [10] In 2014, he co-authored another study showing that every paper retracted because of scientific misconduct costs the National Institutes of Health about $400,000 on average. [11] In 2023, he and Casadevall published "Thinking About Science: Good Science, Bad Science, and How to Make It Better" (ASM/Wiley), a collection of essays.

Related Research Articles

Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Society for Microbiology</span> American scholarly society focused on microbiology

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM), originally the Society of American Bacteriologists, is a professional organization for scientists who study viruses, bacteria, fungi, algae, and protozoa as well as other aspects of microbiology. It was founded in 1899. The Society publishes a variety of scientific journals, textbooks, and other educational materials related to microbiology and infectious diseases. ASM organizes annual meetings, as well as workshops and professional development opportunities for its members.

In academic publishing, a retraction is a mechanism by which a published paper in an academic journal is flagged for being seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but marked as retracted. In some cases it may be necessary to remove an article from publication, such as when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public.

John Roland Darsee is an American physician and former medical researcher. After compiling an impressive list of publications in reputable scientific journals, he was found to have fabricated data for his publications.

Gideon Koren, FACMT, FRCP(C) is an Israeli-Canadian pediatrician, clinical pharmacologist, toxicologist, and a composer of Israeli folk music. He was a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor at the University of Toronto. In 1985, Koren founded the Motherisk Program in Toronto, which was later shut down amid controversy. Furthermore, multiple scientific papers authored by Koren have been subject to concerns regarding academic and research misconduct, leading to the retraction of six research articles and editorial expression of concerns on multiple others. Koren currently has relinquished his licence to practice medicine due to an ongoing investigation into whether he committed “professional misconduct or was incompetent” while he was in charge of the Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory.

Carlo Maria Croce is an Italian–American professor of medicine at Ohio State University, specializing in oncology and the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer. Croce and his research have attracted public attention because of multiple allegations of scientific misconduct.

Joachim Boldt is a German anesthesiologist who fabricated or falsified data, including those reporting clinical trial results.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retraction Watch</span> Blog covering scientific paper retractions

Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics. The blog was launched in August 2010 and is produced by science writers Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. Its parent organization is the Center for Scientific Integrity, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2020 Potti, who is employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, has had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication has received an expression of concern, and two others have been corrected.

Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Yoshitaka Fujii is a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology, who in 2012 was found to have fabricated data in at least 219 scientific papers, of which 172 have been retracted.

Invalid science consists of scientific claims based on experiments that cannot be reproduced or that are contradicted by experiments that can be reproduced. Recent analyses indicate that the proportion of retracted claims in the scientific literature is steadily increasing. The number of retractions has grown tenfold over the past decade, but they still make up approximately 0.2% of the 1.4m papers published annually in scholarly journals.

Annarosa Leri is a medical doctor and former associate professor at Harvard University. Along with former professor Piero Anversa, Leri was engaged in biomedical research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Since at least 2003 Anversa and Leri had investigated the ability of the heart to regenerate damaged cells using cardiac stem cells.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arturo Casadevall</span> Cuban-American scientist

Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregg L. Semenza</span> American physician

Gregg Leonard Semenza is a pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had ten research papers retracted due to falsified data.

The retraction index is a measure of how likely an article published in a given academic journal will be retracted. It is calculated by multiplying the number of retracted articles in a journal during a given time period by 1,000, and then dividing the result by the total number of articles published in that journal during the same period. The term was coined in a 2011 editorial by Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, the co-editors-in-chief of the journal Infection and Immunity. In their original editorial, Fang and Casadevall also showed a strong positive correlation between a journal's retraction index and its impact factor. Among the 17 journals they analyzed, the New England Journal of Medicine had the highest retraction index. The New England Journal of Medicine responded to the Feng and Casadevall editorial with a statement criticizing it for only considering papers with abstracts. The statement argued that because most articles published in each issue of the Journal do not have abstracts, the journal's retraction index appeared artificially high. They did not identify a mechanism for why this relationship might exist, but suggested that it might be because researchers are more willing to cut corners to get a paper published in a higher-impact journal.

Tumor Biology is a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering clinical and experimental oncology. It was established in 1980 as Oncodevelopmental Biology and Medicine, obtaining its current name in 1984. It is owned by the International Society of Oncology and BioMarkers, of which it is the official journal. Originally published by Karger Publishers, it moved to Springer Science+Business Media beginning in 2010. In December 2016, the journal moved again, this time to SAGE Publications. The editor-in-chief is Magdalena Chechlinska. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2016 impact factor of 3.650.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elisabeth Bik</span> Scientific integrity expert (1966-)

Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct, including 400 research papers published by authors in China from a research paper mill company. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.

Abida Sophie Jamal is a Canadian endocrinologist and former osteoporosis researcher who was at the centre of a scientific misconduct case in the mid-to-late 2010s. Jamal published a high-profile paper suggesting that the heart medication nitroglycerin was a treatment for osteoporosis, and was later demonstrated to have misrepresented her results. She received a lifetime ban from receiving funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and was named directly in their disclosure report, becoming the first person mentioned by name by the institute for scientific misconduct. Jamal was later stripped of her medical license for two years, regaining it in a controversial 3–2 decision.

References

  1. 1 2 "Ferric C. Fang". University of Washington. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  2. ↑ "Ferric C. Fang, MD". University of Washington Department of Laboratory Medicine Website. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  3. ↑ "Ferric C. Fang". UW Medicine Providers. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  4. ↑ "Ferric C. Fang". American Society for Clinical Investigation. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  5. ↑ "Ferric C. Fang CV" . Retrieved 2017-09-18.
  6. ↑ Couzin-Frankel, Jennifer (2013-01-25). "Shaking Up Science" (PDF). Science. 339 (6118): 386–389. Bibcode:2013Sci...339..386C. doi:10.1126/science.339.6118.386. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   23349264.
  7. ↑ Zimmer, Carl (17 April 2012). "A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  8. ↑ Fang, Ferric C.; Steen, R. Grant; Casadevall, Arturo (2012-10-16). "Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (42): 17028–17033. Bibcode:2012PNAS..10917028F. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   3479492 . PMID   23027971.
  9. ↑ Spotts, Pete (2012-10-02). "Fraud in scientific research: It happens, and cases are on the rise". Christian Science Monitor. ISSN   0882-7729 . Retrieved 2017-09-18.
  10. ↑ Scheiber, Noam (2015-05-31). "Academics Seek a Big Splash". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-09-18.
  11. ↑ Grens, Kerry (2014-08-15). "The Price Tag of Scientific Fraud". The Scientist. Retrieved 2017-09-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.