Welcome to Fraud Rounds, a regular look at what happens when clinical research goes wrong. For background, see this post.
Bruce Murdoch, a neuroscientist who studied Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis, among other diseases, was able to stay out of jail in Australia despite pleading guilty to fraud charges for scientific misconduct. But he hasn't been spared the retraction of four of his papers, in journals from to the .
Murdoch, formerly of the University of Queensland, pled guilty in March to , and received a 2-year suspended sentence. His former colleague, Caroline Barwood, has also related to research grants to the pair, $175,000 (AU) of which has been returned to funders.
Murdoch admitted to faking co-authors' signatures, patient consent forms, and duplicating his published work. The four retracted papers have been cited only a handful of times in total, according to Thomson Reuters' Web of Science.
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