The journal Nature Synthesis has pulled a high-profile article describing the creation of a new type of carbon after a university investigation found some data were made up.
“The authors of the original paper claimed to have created an entirely new form or carbon, graphyne, which is fundamentally different common diamond or graphite,” said Valentin Rodionov, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, whose team has been investigating the now-retracted work for the past two years.
“If true, this would have been a groundbreaking discovery,” Rodionov told Retraction Watch. His team described its findings in a commentary published on September 2 in the journal.
A retraction notice released the same day stated:
A formal investigation was launched by the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Colorado after concerns were raised about the validity of some of the data reported in this work. From this investigation, it was concluded that the data used to produce Supplementary Figure S10 were fabricated and that the procedures used to produce Figure 2b deviated from standard practices. The investigation committee agreed that the data in Figure S10 are not critical to support the major claim of the manuscript and do not affect the overall scientific advance presented in a significant way. Out of a sense of responsibility, the authors have decided to retract the Article.
The paper has been cited well over 100 times.
The corresponding authors of the study – Wei Zhang at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Yingjie Zhao of Qingdao University of Science and Technology in China – did not respond to requests for comment from Retraction Watch. Asked for comment, a Springer Nature spokesperson referred us to the retraction notice.
Rodionov explained that the authors used a “method called ‘alkyne metathesis,’ which was always expected to be the path to this new material. While this approach failed to work for the last 25 years, in the hands of the authors it has seemingly produced the desired result.”
But the findings didn’t hold up when Rodionov and his colleagues looked more closely. Of the two crystal structures for the synthesized material described in the paper, one “featured a distance between non-bonded carbon atoms which in our opinion is impossibly short,” he said. Furthermore, the reported spectroscopic characterization appeared to disagree with the structure claimed by the authors.”
It turned out that structure “could be generated through a common type of a computer simulation, if the parameters for the simulation were set to incorrect default values.” And that “structure was a perfect match for the reported X-ray diffraction data,” he said, referring to a technique for direct measurement of interatomic distances. Those data “featured an unusual distribution of experimental noise, and overall the noise level was lower than expected.”
Neither discrepancy could be “explained by any reasonable means,” said Rodionov, whose team shared their findings with the University of Colorado and the journal starting in late 2022.
A correction to the paper in July 2022 added a Research Resource ID which had not appeared in the original version.
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