Month: March 2016

Molecular self-assembly paper fell apart

1049_soft_matter_f2c-900Authors are retracting a 2014 paper about how liquid-crystalline materials self-organize in low temperature conditions after realizing they had measured the temperatures incorrectly.

The error affected three figures and a table in “Milestone in the NTB phase investigation and beyond: direct insight into molecular self-assembly.” The paper, published in Soft Matter, has been cited three times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

The retraction note, published in August, offers more detail as to exactly what went wrong:

Continue reading Molecular self-assembly paper fell apart

Death camp dog satire retracted when German journal wasn’t in on joke

Screen Shot 2016-03-01 at 2.46.54 PMTotalitarianism and Democracy has removed a paper claiming that German Shepherds belonging to guards at the Berlin Wall descended from dogs used at concentration camps, after learning that the paper was a work of satire, The Guardian reports.

The paper, and its author, are the creation of the anonymous group “Christiane Schulte and friends.”

This isn’t the first hoax we’ve seen in publishing: Don’t forget journalist John Bohannon, who submitted hundreds of fake papers to open access journals, and more recently conjured up a study that showed chocolate helps you lose weight. (And, of course, a paper in a Romanian magazine that listed porn star Ron Jeremy and Michael Jackson among its references.) Like many other hoaxers, the group say in a statement their purpose was to shine light on problems in academic publishing.

The latest victim: a Dresden-based journal, The Guardian explains:

Continue reading Death camp dog satire retracted when German journal wasn’t in on joke

Entire paper about cell division plagiarized

Chinese med jA paper about the role of specific proteins in the separation of newly replicated chromosomes is being retracted from the Chinese Medical Journal, after editors found out that the entire article was plagiarized.

The study, “MreBCD Associated Cytoskeleton is Required for Proper Segregation of the Chromosomal Terminus during the Division Cycle of Escherichia Coli,” names Feng Lu as the corresponding author and claims that the work was done in his lab at the Medical School of Henan University in Henan, China. The misappropriation came to light when a member of Lawrence Rothfield’s lab at the University of Connecticut saw the paper after it was published online last April, and realized that it was an exact replica of an unpublished paper that Rothfield’s own lab had produced.

Here’s the retraction note from the journal: Continue reading Entire paper about cell division plagiarized

High-profile critic slams Nature letters about dinosaur growth following corrections

cover_nature (1)Authors of a pair of letters in Nature that concluded dinosaurs reached their full size surprisingly quickly are standing by their conclusions, despite challenges from a high-profile critic.

In the letters, researchers led by first author Gregory M. Erickson, a paleobiologist at The Florida State University, concluded that massive dinos grew fast — for example, a 5.5 ton T-Rex could reach skeletal maturity in just two decades. However, when Nathan Myhrvold tried to reanalyze the data, he couldn’t replicate the results. The authors have issued corrections to address the small mistakes unearthed by Myhrvold’s analysis, but argue he couldn’t replicate their results because they hadn’t fully explained their methodology.

After Myhrvold attempted to replicate the findings of maximum size and growth rate for several papers, he found issues in many, including the two Nature letters, according to a press release on Myhrvold’s website: Continue reading High-profile critic slams Nature letters about dinosaur growth following corrections