A paper on the properties of a magnetic material is being retracted after including an author without his permission, and omitting a funding source.
According to the note, the work was done in Miao Yu‘s lab at Chongqing University in China; the authors then added Yu’s name to the paper without his authorization, and neglected to list a relevant funding source.
Here’s the retraction note for “Temperature-dependent dynamic mechanical properties of magnetorheological elastomers under magnetic field,” published in the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief as the authors have used Professor Miao Yu’s name in the article without his authorization. Besides, the work presented in the article came from professor Miao Yu’s laboratory and was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. As such this article represents an abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter.
Here’s the funding source listed on the paper, which has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:
Financial supports from China Chongqing Research Program of Application Foundation and Advanced Technology (no. cstc2014jcyjA50029 and CSTC2013JJB60001); National Technology R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology (no. 2012BAF06B04)
We’ve reached out to Miao Yu, first author Benxiang Ju at the National Instrument Functional Materials Engineering Technology Research Center in China, and last author Changrong Liao of Chongqing University. We’ve also contacted the Editor in Chief of the journal. We’ll update this post with anything else we learn.
Update, 12/30/2015:
We received the following statement from Ju:
I declare that I am the original author for this paper, including idea, experiment and writing. Pro.Yu was my tutor during PHD period, and i sent the manuscript to Materials Letters at 2012.
The Materials Letters is a kind of Letter, and it reflected the preliminary phenomenon for this kind of magnetorheological elastomer. However, this letter (MLBLUE-D-12-05683) was not accepted by Materials Letters. I redesign and improve the research during the postdoctoral stage, and the full research paper was written by using completed study at 2014. Therefore, The paper submitted to JMMM was signed to “National Instrument Functional Materials Engineering Technology Research Center” ＆“Chongqing University”.
The study work was also support by National Technology R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology (No. 2012BAF06B04), and I also participated in National Technology R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology during the postdoctoral stage. This research funds continued to December 2014.
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