A paper in Physical Review Letters has been retracted for “overlap” with two other previously published papers.
The notice isn’t available online yet, so we got in touch with American Physical Society (APS) editorial director Dan Kulp for more information. Here’s what he told us about “Anomalous melting scenario of the two-dimensional core-softened system”:
As you can see the subject Letter was published this past April. A reader informed us a few weeks later that they were concerned by the overlap of the Letter with two other papers by another group (one in PRL and another in J. Chem. Phys.). Since the overlap and relationship between the papers was not completely obvious, the editor sought external advice on the extent of the overlap and effect it has on the novelty of the published Letter. After receiving feedback it was determined that even though the previously published papers were referenced in the Letter, the extent of the citation did not fully reflect the text or concept overlaps, and thus did not properly attribute the original sources.
As for the notice, Kulp tells us:
Hopefully the retraction will be published soon. The proofs were recently returned, so I am hoping for no additional delays.
The paper has been cited just once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
I did a quick Google search of a sentence from the retracted paper. It revealed this paper from the same authors, in a different journal, which seems to contain large chunks of text (and figures) identical to the retracted paper.
The RSC Soft Matter paper linked above is at least in the abstract almost identical in many sentences to a paper ” Hexatic phase in the two-dimensional Gaussian-core model” published in 2011 by S. Prestipino; F. Saija; P. V. Giaquinta https://archive.org/details/arxiv-1107.0828
It looks like we’ve uncovered a web of ‘unexplained similarities’.