Microporous and Mesoporous Materials has retracted a 2015 paper after it was discovered the authors “have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared.”
The paper, “Ionic liquid assisted synthesis of flexible and super-hydrophobic porous gels,” described the synthesis of a form of flexible aerogels “through a facile one-pot preparation,” according to the abstract. According to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge it has been cited zero times.
Here is the retraction note, in full:
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.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 Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Volume 52 (2013) 1986–1989. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201207969. 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.
The paper has only been cited once, and that was by the retraction, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
We contacted the Editor in Chief of the journal, and the corresponding author Huanrong Li, who works at the Hebei University of Technology in China. We will update this post if we hear back.
Hat tip: Jean-Claude Bollinger
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