The Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences has retracted a paper it published earlier this year on the use of facial biometrics to identify humans.
The reason: Evidently, those biometrics had already largely been described by another group.
Here’s the notice:
Statement of Retraction
The Editors and Publishers of Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences have retracted the following article:
“Multiple facial soft biometrics for person identification system” by A. Prakasha and Rajeswari Mukesha Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00450618.2013.788680
We are now cognisant that the authors reproduced significant extracts from another work without permission or acknowledgement, viz., “Bag of Soft Biometrics for Person Identification: New trends and challenges” by Antitza Dantcheva, Carmelo Velardo, Angela D’Angelo, and Jean Luc Dugelay, Multimedia Tools and Applications http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-010-0635-7
This action constitutes a breach of warranties made by the authors with respect to originality and provenance. We note we received, peer-reviewed, accepted, and published the article in good faith based on these warranties, and censure this action accordingly. The article has been removed to comply with the wishes of the injured parties.
Prakasha and Mukesha are at Hindustan University, Chennai, India.
Update, 6:45 p.m. Eastern, 7/2/13: As Akhlesh notes below, the authors’ correct names are Prakash and Mukesh, not Prakasha and Mukesha, as in the notice. We’ve struck through the extra a’s in the last line.
Reblogged this on The Firewall.
1. I have a doubt on the forensic capabilities of the editors of the Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences. Not only could they not unearth plagiarism prior to publication, but they got the names of the plagiarizing authors wrong in the notice of retraction. The authors must be A. Prakash and Rajeswari Mukesh, not A. Prakasha and Rajeswari Mukesha. The spurious “a” at the end of either last name indicates that the editors use MS Word.
2. does not work. Did it ever work?
Crikeya!
Good spot on their names, we’ve updated the post, thanks. Can you explain what you mean by “does not work. Did it ever work?”
1a. The editors of the journal should correct their retraction notice by dropping the two a’s.
1b. Akhlesh, not Aklesh in: “Update, 6:45 p.m. Eastern, 7/2/13:….” That reminds me of a line from My Fair Lady: “… dropping eches (h’s) everywhere….”.
2. From my comment, your software swallowed the URL of the paper that has been retracted. Here it is again (if it is not swallowed again): .
Added back the h, apols.
Not sure why WordPress is erasing the URL, others seem to be posting them alright. In any case, you can email it to me and I’ll add it, address here: http://www.retractionwatch.com/about/
– “a” added must be superscripts in the original authors list. when you copy and paste from the journal site – superscript function might have been lost….
Good thought, but if you follow the link to the notice — http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00450618.2013.815691 — those a’s aren’t superscripts.