Researcher fails in legal bid to halt expression of concern by journal Diabetes

A Brazilian researcher who sued the American Diabetes Association to prevent its flagship journal Diabetes retracting four of his papers or publishing an expression of concern about his research has failed to convince a US federal judge to issue a restraining order.

Mario Saad, professor in the department of medicine at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in São Paulo, Brazil, alleged in his suit that the association had informed his university that Diabetes and other journals of the association would accept no submissions from Unicamp researchers until the situation was resolved.

The association’s panel on ethical scientific programs contacted Saad after readers raised concerns about potentially duplicated and manipulated images in two papers published in Diabetes in 2011 and 2007. Saad acknowledged the duplications but said that the image files had inadvertently been mixed up during editing. He offered a new image and proposed corrections.

The panel did not accept this explanation and asked the university to investigate the two papers. A …