Ultramicroscopy has retracted a paper it published earlier this year after the corresponding author admitted to submitting the paper without the consent of his colleagues.
The article, “The post-peak spectra in electron energy loss near edge structure,” came from a group led by one Feng Tian, a materials scientist at Shanghai University for Science and Technology. The other authors were Peter Shattschneider and Micheal Stoger-Pollach, of the Vienna University of Technology. Except that they weren’t.
According to the retraction notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and authors, because the co-authors were not aware of nor had been involved in the preparation and submission of the paper. The corresponding author confirmed and has apologised.
The paper has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
We tried to reach Stoger-Pollach and will update this post if we hear back from him.
Is this the same Dr. Feng as these papers?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/chem.201300524/abstract
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130917/ncomms3500/fig_tab/ncomms3500_F2.html
Something really does sound strange with this story. How can someone who is so smart as to be able to publish in a Nature Publishing Group journal be so foolish as to steal the identities of two Austrian scientists?