Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering is retracting a 2011 paper by an Italian researcher who submitted a similar article to another journal. What makes this interesting is that the retracted article appears to be the one that was published first.
The article, “Free vibrations of laminated composite doubly-curved shells and panels of revolution via the GDQ method,” was written by Francesco Tornabene, an engineer at the University of Bologna and has been cited five times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As the notice explains:
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).
The Editors of Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering have authorized the retraction of this article, as the substance of the paper has been published in essentially the same form, with a marginal extension of the implemented theory, as ‘2-D GDQ solution for free vibrations of anisotropic doubly-curved shells and panels of revolution’ by Francesco Tornabene in Composite Structures 93/7 (2011) 1854–1876 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruct.2011.02.006).
One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that the paper is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The paper in Composite Structures was published in June 2011, four months after Tornabene’s article appeared in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering.
We reached Tornabene by email, and he offered this explanation (note: Given that English is not his first language, we fixed a few spelling errors but otherwise did not alter his comments):
The scientific substance of the article retracted is not compromised from the second article.
The imperfection was the form of the two articles that are similar, but the scientific concepts exposed are completely different. You can control the equations, that are different because referred to two different theories.
The CAMAME Journal has decided independently from the author the retraction of the article without giving the possibility to the author to write an errata in order to introduce the corrected citation in the second paper.
The article in Composite Structures is an expansion of the article in CMAME Journal.
Formally, the CMAME Journal can have the reason, but substantially not. I committed an ingenuous formal mistake.
The retraction is due to the fact that the CMAME article was not cited properly.
“One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that the paper is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.”
Maybe the order in which the manuscripts were submitted was different from the order in which they were ultimately published.
The submission dates might be of interest, but considering the fairly close dates of publication, it seems likely that Tornabene submitted to both journals at about the same time. In my opinion, both journals are justified in retracting the paper for violation of the rules. Wonder whether the other journal will also retract.
Because the review-and-acceptance-or-rejection process is slow, and sometime ridiculously slow, I can sympathize with researchers who submit to several journals intending to actually publish in whichever journal accepts the paper first. However, an author who continues in discussions with other journals after being accepted in one has not only violated the “formal” rules, as Tornabene concedes, but has violated the intent of the rules as well.
You mention that “the paper in Composite Structures was published in June 2011, four months after Tornabene’s article appeared in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering”. Actually, it would be better to take into account the date for online availability of articles, which, in the case of Elsevier, is the date for the actual release in the public domain of a paper.
The “Composite Structures” has been made available on February 26, 2011, and the now retracted CMAME paper was available on November 30, 2010. That means a 3 months difference, rather than 4 months.
Unfortunately, “Composite structures” don’t insert the date of submission in the “Article history” section, which is essential in the cases of primacy disputes.
Finally, Tornabene is not wrong claiming that “The article in Composite Structures is an expansion of the article in CMAME Journal”. An instance is table 12, which reports 2 sections (GDQ-RM and GDQ-TL) in “Composite Structures” while the same Table had a single section in CNAME, which is a verbatim copy of the GDQ-RM section in “Composite Structures”.
However, it is also obvious that the claimed expansion should be very very thin. For 23 figures reported in both articles, it seems to me that 22 are identical. Both papers quote 75 references, with some swapped references. Very large portions of the text are word-to-word duplications, etc. For a single-author work, published two times within a so short period, I can hardly believe to the “ingenuous formal mistake” argument.
I just refereed for a journal a paper already about to come out in another journal (under a very slightly modified title; content substantially identical). I pointed this out to the editors, and the the author withdrew the second submission. But the editors didn’t seem particularly upset by it, and nor was the author particularly penitent.
Brave new world, Molly. Nobody is surprised at cheating. Nobody (well, nobody except you and the other folks on this blog) is upset at cheaters. The cheaters view getting caught as a gamble that didn’t pay off rather than as a violation of ethics and a betrayal of the scientific community to which they claim to belong. And you can see why the cheaters try again. They were not punished. At worst, they are divested of the fruits of their deception. At best, they avoid detection and get to keep the prize. So why wouldn’t they take the chance?
Sorry that you had to waste your volunteered time reviewing a manuscript that has been withdrawn. Publishers should charge authors for the wasted time if a manuscript is found to be in violation of the basic rules, like being plagiarized, containing data made up out of whole cloth, submitted to multiple journals, and so forth.
How did you know about the forthcoming paper in the other journal?
Oh, simple: I just googled the paper’s title and lo and behold, there was a duplicate in press. Seems to me that’s something editors, or even journal management systems could do.