“Conflicts among the authors” force retraction of Talanta paper

Talanta, a journal serving the analytical chemistry community — we’d love to know how the name came to be — has retracted a 2013 article by a group of Indian researchers over an authorship dispute.

The paper, “Non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor based on silver/silver oxide nano-rods reinforced with multiwall carbon nanotubes,” appeared in January, with the authors listed as Leila Shahriary, Santosh K. Haram and Anjali A. Athawale.

But according to the retraction notice:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors.

The authors have decided to retract this article because of conflicts among the authors on the right to publish these results.

It’s hard to know exactly what went wrong here — we’ve tried to reach the journal for clarification but have yet to hear back — but one plausible explanation is that one or more of the trio decided to submit the paper without informing the others. We’ve certainly seen that kind of thing before.

We found a related, but not identical, retraction in Talanta going back to 2009 and involving a 2005 paper titled “Simultaneous micellar electrokinetic chromatography and liquid chromatography of adriblastina and tarabine PFS: Their application to some biological fluids”:

Reason: This article duplicates significant parts of a paper by the same authors that has appeared in J. Sep. Sci., 28 (2005) 534–542. Furthermore, the last two authors, Roberto Gotti and Vincenza Andrisano, have indicated that they were not involved in the research nor in the preparation or submission of the two papers. 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 we apologize to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.