A leading chemistry journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a pair of researchers in Switzerland after determining that it contained fabricated data.
The article, “The manganese(I)‐catalyzed asymmetric transfer hydrogenation of ketones: disclosing the macrocylic privilege,” was written by Alessandro Passera and Antonio Mezzetti, of the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. It appeared in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Readers might remember Angewandte Chemie from this post in June about a controversial article it published — and then removed — in the wake of a mass outcry that prompted much of its editorial board to resign and led to the suspension of two of its editors. Fallout from the scandal — in the form of “the journal’s interim Editor-in-Chief Committee” — is evident in the retraction notice, which reads:
The above article from Angewandte Chemie International Edition, published online on 14 November 2019 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201912605), and in print in Volume 59, pp. 187–191, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, Alessandro Passera and Prof. Dr. Antonio Mezzetti (corresponding author), the journal’s interim Editor‐in‐Chief Committee, and Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH&Co. KGaA, Weinheim. The retraction has been agreed upon following the explanation by the authors that this article contained improperly manipulated and fabricated data. The corresponding author was unaware of and not involved in these actions.
Mezzetti, the corresponding author, told us that:
I’m getting cautious after what happened with the above paper.
He said he was “ready to give details” about what happened with the data, but then did not do so.
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