Our mothers told us that if we used the masterbatch process, we’d go blind. And what better way to gather some updates to recent posts than to include one that involves said masterbatch process?
First, a retraction John Spevacek noticed when he tried clicking on the link in a Journal of Applied Polymer Science retraction we’d covered:
The following article from the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, “Mechanical and thermal properties enhancement of polycarbonate nanocomposites prepared by melt compounding” by Sanjay K. Nayak, Smita Mohanty, and Sushanta K. Samal, published online on 7 April 2010 in Wiley Online Library (J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2010, 117, 2101; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/app.31222/full), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal’s editors, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed due to significant overlap with respect to another article, “Effect of hydrogen bonding on the rheology of polycarbonate/organoclay nanocomposites,” by Kyung Min Lee, and Chang Dae Han, published online on 19 June 2003 in Polymer (2003, 44, 4573).
As journal editor Stefano Tonzani explained in a comment he left on Retraction Watch and on Spevacek’s blog:
…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).
The Nayak paper has been cited seven times, including once by the retraction, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, and the notice — which is unfortunately behind a paywall — appeared in December 2012.
Now, a new one in the same journal, which appeared June 13 and involves the masterbatch process:
The following article from the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, “PP/PP-g-MAH/layered expanded graphite oxide nanocomposites prepared via masterbatch process,” by Jun Bian, Xiao Wei Wei, Hai Lan Lin, I Ta Chang, and Erol Sancaktar, published online on 10 July 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), and in Volume 128, pp. 600–610, has been withdrawn by agreement between the journal’s editors and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The action has been agreed due to unacknowledged overlap between Figure 4 in the above paper and Figure 2a in Composites Science and Technology, Volume 67 (2007), p. 2528, and the apparent misrepresentation of the material depicted therein. The publisher acknowledges that co-authors I Ta Chang and Erol Sancaktar are not responsible for the issues associated with this article.
The “unacknowledged overlap” would seem to refer to plagiarism, given there are no authors that, um, overlap. The study has yet to be cited. This makes four retractions we’ve recently covered in the journal.
Now onto Clinical Gerontologist, whose publisher, Taylor & Francis, apparently thought better of charging $37 to let people know that they had accidentally published a study twice. They’ve removed the paywall. Hurrah! And thanks to Rolf Degen for the tip.
Finally, two retraction notices have appeared for Microbiology studies that we had previously reported would be retracted. The third and fourth retractions for the group both say the same thing:
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article has been retracted at the request of Microbiology because identical bands for the 16S rRNA probe controls in the Northern blots were reported to correspond to experiments using different strains and experimental conditions in articles published in this journal and in Journal of Bacteriology over a period of 5 years, i.e. the following:
1. Carlos Barreiro, Eva González-Lavado, Miroslav Pátek & Juan-Francisco Martín (2004). Transcriptional analysis of the groES–groEL1, groEL2, and dnaK genes in Corynebacterium glutamicum: characterization of heat shock-induced promoters. J Bacteriol 186, 4813–4817. doi:10.1128/JB.186.14.4813-4817.2004
2. Carlos Barreiro, Eva González-Lavado, Sven Brand, Andreas Tauch & Juan F. Martín (2005). Heat shock proteome analysis of wild-type Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 and a spontaneous mutant lacking GroEL1, a dispensable chaperone. J Bacteriol 187, 884–889. doi:10.1128/JB.187.3.884-889.2005
3. Mónica Barriuso-Iglesias, Carlos Barreiro, Fabio Flechoso & Juan F. Martín (2006). Transcriptional analysis of the F0F1 ATPase operon of Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 reveals strong induction by alkaline pH. Microbiology 152, 11–21. doi:10.1099/mic.0.28383-0
4. Carlos Barreiro, Diana Nakunst, Andrea T. Hüser, Héctor D. de Paz, Jörn Kalinowski, & Juan F. Martín (2009). Microarray studies reveal a ‘differential response’ to moderate or severe heat shock of the HrcA- and HspR-dependent systems in Corynebacterium glutamicum. Microbiology 155, 359–372. doi:10.1099/mic.0.019299-0
Drs Barreiro and Martín take sole responsibility for these instances of data duplication and would like to apologize to the readers, reviewers and editors of both the Journal of Bacteriology and Microbiology.