A paper on partially entangled states seems to have fallen victim to a confusing entanglement of authors and studies.
Here’s the notice for the paper, “Optimal quantum communication using multiparticle partially entangled states,” by Atul Kumar, Satyabrata Adhikari, Subhashish Banerjee, and Sovik Roy:
This article should be considered withdrawn from publication. Although the paper shows that maximal slice (MS) states are not locally equivalent to the χ states, it fails to reference and discuss the closely related material presented in the following article: T. Gao, F. L. Yan, and Y. C. Li, Europhys. Lett. 84, 5001 (2008).
The article also makes extensive use of a preprint by Dr. A. Kumar, Dr. A. Kalchenko, and Dr. S. Ghose. Although the article acknowledges S. Ghose, Dr. Ghose and Dr. A. Kaltchenko are not included as authors.
Although Drs. Adhikari, Banerjee, and Roy did not know about the preprint, Drs. Kumar, Adhikari, Banerjee, and Roy, together with Physical Review A, apologize to both Drs. Ghose and Kaltchenko, and also to Dr. Gao and his coauthors for these omissions.
Taking the reasons for the retraction in order: Failing to reference a prior study is clearly bad practice, but if journals consistently used that as a reason to retract, the retraction figures would be staggering.
Making “extensive use” of a preprint without including its authors on the subsequent paper, however, seems like typical grounds for a retraction. And this notice places the blame pretty squarely on the shoulders of Atul Kumar, of the Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan, in Jodhpur, India — the only one of the study’s authors who seems to have known about the preprint.
That’s kind of puzzling, though, given that Adhikari, Banerjee, and Roy are all co-authors on the preprint.
Partially entangled states, indeed.
Hat tip: Chris Lee
Update, 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 5/21/13: Struck through line about authors of the preprint, and removed link in the previous sentence. As commenter Schlupp points out, the notice appears to be referring to a different preprint (which doesn’t seem to be on arXiv).
Hm, but is this the preprint in question? It seems that the preprint you link to is the one corresponding to the paper in question, which would be *supposed* to be pretty much the same as the paper. (And to have the same author list, naturally.)
From the notice, it appears that there is another preprint (apparently not on arXiv, though) with a different author list.
Good point. Corrected the post.
” Failing to reference a prior study is clearly bad practice, but if journals consistently used that as a reason to retract, the retraction figures would be staggering.”
Yes, this is clearly not grounds for retraction. For most fields there are tons of ‘closely related work’ that might be discussed in any particular paper. But what you choose to discuss is up to the authors, surely. And if the paper is flawed or incomplete because of the omission to discuss a certain paper, that is a matter for the review and acceptance process. Note that the retracted authors are not accused of failing to acknowledge or cite sources, but failing to even discuss something that someone else (not the reviewers or editors) thought was important. Sounds like someone got butthurt because they weren’t cited.