Researchers invent time machine! (But too late to avoid retraction for duplication)

A common theme in movies involving time travel is that if you meet yourself in the past, you’ll upset the time-space continuum, and cause all sorts of problems. Well, a group of materials scientists in Hong Kong seems to have invented a time machine, and learned that if if you publish a paper that appears to have been published in the future, you’ll suffer a retraction (and correction) for duplicating your own data.

We’ll (try to) explain.

The group in 1997 published a paper in Composite Interfaces titled “Reliability of fiber Bragg grating sensors embedded in textile composites.”

But now comes the following — inscrutable — Corrigendum:

We note that our article duplicates significant parts of an article which we subsequently published in Composites Science and Technology: Xiaoming Tao, Liqun Tang, Wei-chong Du, Chung-loong Choy, “Internal strain measurement by fiber Bragg grating sensors in textile composites”, Composites Science and Technology, 60(5), April 2000, 657–669. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0266353899001633

The Composites Science and Technology article has been retracted at the request of the authors. We offer a sincere apology to the editors, readers, and publishers of Composite Interfaces, for not being able to cite appropriately reused data from our article in Composite Science and Technology due to negligence caused by poor communication between the authors. We note that the editors and publishers of Composite Interfaces received, peer-reviewed, accepted, and published our article in good faith.

In other words, the 1997 paper has data that duplicated a 2000 paper, which the authors were — understandably — unable to cite properly, since the paper in which the data first appeared hadn’t come out yet. Got it?

We can understand why these material scientists would be in a hurry to clear up the confusion, what with the risk to the fabric of space-time and all.

Seriously, though, we have ask: What were the editors thinking? Reading a retraction notice shouldn’t be more painful than taking a test in relativity, general, special or otherwise. We’re pretty sure two simple commas could have plugged up the wormhole here, and killed the ironic beast of poor communication aborning:

appropriately reused data from our article [insert comma here] in Composite Science and Technology [insert comma here] due to negligence caused by poor communication between the authors.

But not quite. The retraction notice in Composites Science and Technology gets it right — and adds a bit to the story:

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

The article duplicates significant parts of papers that had already appeared in [Compos. Interfaces, 1998, 5(5), 421-435] and [Smart Mater. Struct. 1999, 8, 154-160)]. 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.

Meanwhile, time-traveling manuscripts seem to be a new thing. Here’s a case, courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, of a paper that was published before the work it was based on was even completed.