Last November, we wrote about the retraction of a paper from the Journal of Vinyl and Additive Technology for “pervasive misattribution of data” that rendered “the article’s subsequent discussion and conclusions meaningless and misleading.”
The group now has another retraction, for exactly the same reason. The new notice appears in the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, and the language is identical, because the two journals are both published by Wiley:
The following article from the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, ‘‘Microencapsulation of intumescent flame-retardant agent and application to epoxy resins,’’ by Ming Gao, Yaqi Wo, and Weihong Wu, published online on 25 August 2010 in Wiley Online Library (J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2011, 119, 2025; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/app.31222/full), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal’s editors, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed because a pervasive misattribution of data resulted in fundamentally flawed experimental results, thus rendering the article’s subsequent discussion and conclusions meaningless and misleading.
The study has been cited six times, according to Thomson Scientific, including once by the same group of authors.
Another retraction appeared recently in the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, for somewhat different reasons:
The following article from the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, “Isolation and chemical structure characterization of enzymatic lignin from Populus deltoides wood,” by Ali Abdulkhani, Alinaghi Karimi, Ahmad Mirshokraie, Yahya Hamzeh, Nathalie Marlin, and Gerard Mortha, published online on 21 May 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), and in Volume 118, pp. 469–479, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal’s editors, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed due to unacknowledged overlap between Figure 5 in the above paper and Figure 1 in Industrial Crops and Products, Volume 30 (2009), p. 137, as well as inappropriate data manipulation associated with this figure. The publisher acknowledges that co-authors Nathalie Marlin and Gerard Mortha are not responsible for the issues associated with this article.
In this case, the authors — or at least some of them — seem to have plagiarized a figure, since there’s no overlap with the authors of the Industrial Crops and Products paper. The now-retracted paper has yet to be cited.
Please see an update on this post.
This is Stefano Tonzani, the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Applied Polymer Science, the link to the first paper is wrong (it was wrong in the retraction notice, which we are now fixing). Instead of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/app.31222/full the link should be http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/app.32930/abstract (which goes to the article “Microencapsulation of intumescent flame-retardant agent and application to epoxy resins” by Ming Gao,Yaqi Wo and Weihong Wu).