Chemist loses two papers, one each for plagiarism and duplication

A researcher at Shanxi Normal University in China has notched two retractions, once for plagiarism and one for duplication.

Here’s the most recent notice, which appeared in Chemical Physics Letters on September 25:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

The Authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in: V. Ozolins, E.H. Majzoub and C. Wolverton, First-Principles Prediction of Thermodynamically Reversible Hydrogen Storage Reactions in the Li-Mg-Ca-B-H System, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 131 (2009) 230–237; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja8066429.

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a 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.

This was the second recent retraction for Hai-Shun Wu. The first was “Ab Initio investigation of structures and stability of Ga_nP_m (n = 1–3, m = 1–4) clusters,” from the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry. That paper was originally published in 2006, and retracted in January 2012:

This article has been retracted because the authors and editors of the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry have agreed that the article is nearly identical to an article published in Acta Physica Sinica 53(4): 1056–1062, 2004.

Hat tip: Michael Fischer