Twenty-four years after submitting a manuscript on quantum algebra to the preprint server arXiv, a mathematician has now withdrawn it.
Boris Shoikhet, then of the Independent University of Moscow, posted “Lifting formulas, Moyal product, and Feigin spectral sequence,” to arXiv on Oct. 28, 1998, proposing new conjectures in the field of quantum algebra.
Last month, he withdrew the article, with the comment, “The paper has been withdrawn due to a crucial mistake in the arguments.”
We emailed Shoikhet to learn more about the “crucial mistake,” but he did not respond.
arXiv allows authors to withdraw papers whenever they’d like, with as much or little detail about their reasons as they care to provide. An arXiv withdrawal serves the same function as a journal retraction, although all prior versions remain online, without notation that the paper was withdrawn. The earlier versions of Shoikhet’s post have no marks to show that it was eventually withdrawn.
Researchers interested in how often preprints are eventually published in peer reviewed journals have found this happens for about two-thirds of biomedical preprints, and the proportion is roughly similar for preprints in physics and math.
Shoikhet now appears to be on the mathematics faculty at the University of Antwerp. His ORCID profile indicates he was a PhD student at the Independent University of Moscow at the time he submitted the now-withdrawn paper. He also seems to be a prolific arXiv user, with 44 posts through October 2022.
While 24 years is certainly a long time between publication and retraction, we’ve seen longer gaps. As we’ve reported, in 2003 an 80-year-old paper from the Netherlands was retracted due to fraud. The article was a putative case report of a man who coughed up four cups of urine and had a kidney located in his chest cavity that the medical team found in an autopsy. Decades later, one of the authors admitted the group had made up the case as medical students.
Disclosure: Our co-founder Ivan Oransky is a member of arXiv’s Scientific Advisory Board as part of his work at the Simons Foundation, which funds the arXiv.
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Better late than never. Here is another paper, published in 1992, that should be retracted: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8255290/ . It alleges to be a failed replication attempt of the result of another rather famous paper. The statement therein that “no aspect of the data is consistent with the previously published claims” is simply false, as anyone who reads it carefully may verify. Here are some pointers: https://weirdtech.com/sci/expe.html for wannabe sleuths .
I don’t see what the story is, here. Had his results been cited by anyone? Is there evidence that he knew his paper was flawed (say by a logical or technical error) and kept it up anyway? If anything, this highlights the self-correcting nature of science and math — when you find a mistake, after no matter how long, you fix it or retract the result.
Exactly, furthermore, this was uploaded in arXiv, which is meant to serve as a pre-print platform to disseminate and gain feedback on works that have not been published.
The idea of having arXiv papers withdrawn upon the realization of an error, should not be demonized in the same light as a paper that has undergone peer review.
If anyone uses a pre-print to draw conclusions in the same light as a peer-review paper, it should be on them for equating a non-peer-review preprint as being the same as a peer-review paper.
If Shoikhet has discovered an error in his own work 20+ years later and has withdrawn the paper from the arxiv, then he has behaved in an exemplary manner.
You should be ashamed for criticizing him for it.
Where is the criticism? It appears to be more of a criticism of ArXiv and the way it handles people retracting their preprints.
In fact, I was surprised reading this blog, because I didn’t see anything in my action of withdrawal of an old paper which deserved to attract a wider public attention. I can only add that this paper had never been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. I know a mathematician who was interested by these ideas, and by this paper, and I replied to him about the problem in detail, in our email correspondence.
As the journalist accuses me for not answering his email (which was sent from his private email address and was considered by me as a spam), may I quote this email here.
Sorry for leaving this email unanswered, then and now.
Boris, I appreciate your post. However, regarding your claim that there has been an ‘accusation’, I interpret the relevant quote – and now I confirm it by your response- as a simple statement of fact and not an accusation: “We emailed Shoikhet to learn more about the “crucial mistake,” but he did not respond”. I also don’t read this post as criticizing, let alone demonizing, you in any way. I thought the post was newsworthy given the relatively long time span between the posting of the paper and its withdrawal. Moreover, if I were a mathematician I would be curious about the sort of mistake that could have laid dormant in the paper for so long. But be all that as it may, and given the circumstances as described, why not use this opportunity to comment on the nature of the mistake so that others who may have relied on your paper for their own work become fully informed? Such a gesture would most certainly further exemplify the self-corrective nature of science that you have demonstrated by withdrawing the paper in the first place.
I’m more wondered what do foreign Russian researchers inside technological institutes, espionage?
RW, this is too much.
Mr. Boos, before throwing BS accusations, please first check the background of a person you are accusing. If nothing else, this link is helpful enough: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=author%3A%22boris+shoikhet%22&btnG=