As many retractions as we cover here at Retraction Watch, there have been far more since we started blogging in August that we haven’t had the chance to report out fully. Some of those have been tips from our loyal readers — which we always appreciate, even if we can’t get to them immediately.
So rather than let all of these retractions molder on a list on our laptops, we’re starting an occasional series. In each post, we’ll highlight about five notices, adding whatever notes we have. If anyone has more information about any of these, we of course welcome it in the comments.
Here are the first five, several of which coincidentally have an environmental theme:
1. ICES Journal of Marine Science: “Evaluating the suitability of coupled biophysical models for fishery management“
Article 10.1093/icesjms/fsq115, ‘Evaluating the suitability of coupled biophysical models for fishery management’ by Hans-Harald Hinrichsen, Mark Dickey-Collas, Martin Huret, Myron A. Peck, and Frode Vikebø (originally published online 8 August 2010), has been retracted owing to belatedly discovered misrepresentation and copyright clearance issues. The editors of the ICES Journal of Marine Science apologize for any problems this may cause.
Notes: The vague retraction notice was published on October 28, 2010, and the original paper seems to have disappeared completely from the journal’s site.
2. PLoS ONE: “Fisheries and Marine Animal Populations: Learning from the Long Term“
It has been brought to the attention of the PLoS ONE Editors that a substantial part of the text in this article was appropriated from text in the following publication:
Holm P, Marboe AH, Poulsen B, MacKenzie BR (2010) Marine animal populations: A new look back in time. In: McIntyre AD, editor. Life in the world’s oceans. London (WileyBlackwell), 2010.
The first author of the article, Dr Starkey, has claimed responsibility for the problem that has led to the withdrawal of this overview.
PLoS ONE therefore retracts this article due to the identified case of plagiarism.
The original study was published on January 7, 2011. On January 9, a reader noted that:
The themes addressed in this overview are elaborated upon in Holm P, Marboe AH, Poulsen B, MacKenzie BR (2010) Marine animal populations: A new look back in time. In: McIntyre AD, editor. Life in the world’s oceans: Diversity, distribution and abundance. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 3-24.
The authors added a reference to the book chapter and an acknowledgment on January 27, but the editors retracted the paper on February 3.
3. Environmental Health Perspectives: “Serum Fluoride Level and Children’s Intelligence Quotient in Two Villages in China“
Following Ahead of Print publication EHP learned that many of the data had been published in a previous paper (Xiang et al. 2003. Effect of fluoride in drinking water on children’s intelligence. Fluoride 36: 84-94), in violation of EHP‘s policy regarding the use of previously published material in original Research Articles. Consequently, the paper was withdrawn by EHP on 10 January 2011.
The original paper was published on December 17, 2010, and was cited by Peter Vallone, a New York City council member representing Queens, as evidence that the city should stop fluoridating its water.
The article “Lanthanide–Alkali Metal Sandwich Complexes: Synthesis, Structure, and Solvent-Mediated Redox Transformations, and One-Dimensional Frameworks Assembled through Cation–Arene π Interactions” by Cheng-Ling Pan, Xingwei Li, and Hongjie Zhang, published online on November 24, 2009 in Wiley Online Library (http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/10.1002/chem.200901991) has been retracted (October 9, 2010) by the journal editor-in-chief, Dr. Neville Compton, and Wiley-VCH, in accordance with the “EUCheMS Ethical Guidelines for Publication in Journals and Reviews” adhered to by the journal (EUCheMS Ethical Guidelines for Publication in Journals and Reviews, 2006), due to lack of agreement among the authors regarding its publication.
The retraction appeared online on January 5, 2011, and seems to be another case of “We wrote what?”
5. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine: “Inhibition of nonneuronal alpha7-nicotinic receptor for lung cancer treatment“
The article by Laura Paleari, Eva Negri, Alessia Catassi, Michele Cilli, Denis Servent, Rolando D’Angelillo, Alfredo Cesario, Patrizia Russo, and Massimo Fini that was published in the June 15, 2009 issue of AJRCCM has been retracted due to concerns regarding the veracity of the data presented.
The original paper has been cited 11 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The retraction notice was published in the December 2010 issue of the journal, which doesn’t seem to have had a retraction in a decade until it ran four other retractions in February.
Hat tips: Douglas Main, Klaus Heissler
I suspect that there may be a number of cases similar to Number 2 out there. Book chapters are just about the only scientific publications nowadays that aren’t readily Googleable or otherwise searchable so if you were going to plagiarize from somewhere, it would make sense to do it from a book, rather than from a paper.
Still, it’s not a good idea, because increasingly they are searchable.
I’d say “Still, it’s not a good idea, because it is immoral” 😉
Hi, I would love it if retraction watch also dug more information on this: http://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(11)00292-3