International Studies Quarterly, a Wiley title, is retracting a paper because — oops! — it published the same article twice, unbeknownst to the authors.
Here’s the notice:
The publisher would like to draw the reader’s attention to an error by the journal editorial office and publisher that led to a second version of the following article being published without the author’s knowledge.
Retraction: Jensen, Nathan M. (2013) Domestic Institutions and the Taxing of Multinational Corporations. International Studies Quarterly 57, pp. 751–759.
The above article, published online on 30 September 2013 in Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/isqu.12099/full), has been retracted by agreement between the author, the editors, and the International Studies Association. The article may be accessed in, and should be cited as, its originally published form: in International Studies Quarterly 57, pp. 440–448. doi: 10.1111/isqu.12015.
It’s a perfectly clear retraction notice. But would it have killed Wiley to offer the author an apology for a screwup that will now link the author’s name to “retraction” whenever someone searches for him by name in Google or in literature indices? Here’s a template, if needed.
Hat tip: Rolf Degen
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Happened to me in 2003. Indoor Air republished our June article entirely in September. The publishers subsequently did publish a note regretting their error but did not retract the September article. Both are listed on PubMed. Despite repeated requests to the publishers to officially retract it, they have ignored me. I am now listed with DejaVu as an author who has self-plagiarised.
So, when is Springer going to retract the apparent double I list below? And, like this, there are at least half a dozen cases that I have already reported to Springer Science + Business Media.
The first case is:
Plant and Soil July 2005, Volume 274, Issue 1-2, pp 51-78
Root-based N2-fixing Symbioses: Legumes, Actinorhizal Plants, Parasponia sp. and Cycads
J. Kevin Vessey, Katharina Pawlowski, Birgitta Bergman
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11104-005-5881-5
Plant and Soil January 2005, Volume 266, Issue 1-2, pp 205-230
Root-based N2-fixing symbioses: Legumes, actinorhizal plants, Parasponia sp. and cycads
J. Kevin Vessey, Katharina Pawlowski, Birgitta Bergman
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11104-005-0871-1
The ridiculous thing is that the first reference has been cited 21 times while the second one has been referenced 25 times.
This seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation, arising entirely at the fault of publishers. Perhaps this offers one of the few instances where disappearing an article would be appropriate?
Perhaps an easy way to do this would be to submit a correction, accompanied by an editorial note not retracting the article, but correcting it to an authorless, titleless, blank page. By submitted the editorial, along with the updated version of the article, to indexing sites the journal could appropriately correct the literature: nothing should have been published, the authors did not authorize publication, and therefore nothing has become published. Of course, anyone curious would be able to find: the accompanying editorial via indexing services as well as a link to the editorial and accompanying blank page correction at the online version of the journal where the index is. Perhaps the only other reason for doing something along these lines would be the printing of stolen, unpublished data (which, of course, would have to come with a complex editorial along with the authors names being kept public and searchable, etc.).
At least in pubmed, it must be not very difficult at all to do things like change author lists/paper titles without changing the actual database location, because our friend BJH/AJ seems to have done this quite easily for illegitimate purposes. If an authors (not even editor) can remove authors and change titles, I see no reason why an editor shouldn’t be able to correct his/her own journals’ blatant mistakes that clearly have no ethical implications about the authors.
The same happened to me with my very first paper (published as a student). I didn’t know it had happened, but when I searched for my name, three records came up: the initial paper, the second, duplicated paper, and a third, embarrassing “retraction” notice on the second one.
I am the author of this paper. I discovered this when I received a content alert on the new issue, which included my article from the previous issue published a second time. The journal editor and staff were very nice about it. I notified my department chair immediately about what had happened and we laughed about it. So I am hopeful this is a “no harm, no foul” situation. I briefly blogged about this here:
http://pages.wustl.edu/nathanjensen/articles/7130
Nate