Researchers in the United States and Singapore have lost a 2016 article in Science Advances after some of the group learned that one of their colleagues appears to have used duplicated images in the work.
The article, “A universal cooperative assembly-directed method for coating of mesoporous TiO2 nanoshells with enhanced lithium storage properties,” was written by Bu Yuan Guan, then of the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, along with colleagues at that institution and Ju Li, of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The paper has been cited 167 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
According to the retraction notice:
Science Advances is publishing a Retraction for the article “A universal cooperative assembly-directed method for coating of mesoporous TiO2 nanoshells with enhanced lithium storage properties,” by Bu Yuan Guan and colleagues, at the request of all authors of the original paper except Guan, who opposed the retraction. The other three authors found two duplicated images that were previously published in two papers by Guan et al. Because of this, the three authors expressed that their confidence in the validity of the data in the paper is largely compromised and requested a prompt retraction of the article.
Although the notice doesn’t identify the two papers, Li told us that they are a 2014 article in Nano Research titled “A versatile cooperative template-directed coating method to synthesize hollow and yolk-shell mesoporous zirconium titanium oxide nanospheres as catalytic reactors,” and a 2013 article in Nanoscale titled “A versatile cooperative template-directed coating method to construct uniform microporous carbon shells for multifunctional core-shell nanocomposites.”
Guan, who is now at Jilin University in China, did not respond to a request for comment.
David Lou, a co-author of the now-retracted paper, told us that he became aware of the image issue in March:
we checked Dr. Guan’s PhD thesis and his published papers, and we were shocked to find these two duplicated images in his previous papers. I actually immediately contacted Dr. Guan for an explanation, but he refused to communicate with me. After discussion with Prof. Ju Li, we immediately informed the Science Advances Editorial office.
The integrity officer in Science Advances communicated with Dr. Guan. From Guan’s reply to the integrity officer, he insisted that he just misused the images and did nothing wrong. His position is that a correction will be sufficient for the misused images. But the integrity officer in Science Advances is not convinced, and Prof. Ju Li and I agree to retract the paper.
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It was only a very, very small ethical lapse!
Nanoscule, in fact.
If his thesis contain duplicated images, isn’t that ground for revoking his PhD title?
One thing I don’t really understand. Does figure duplication mean that a figure can be used to represent two materials?? Right