Researchers in Australia have retracted a 2020 nanotechnology study after their institution’s research integrity office found the paper had misappropriated the work of undergraduate students at their school.
According to the retraction notice, the study stated the data belonged to an industry consulting project when in fact they originated from undergraduate work. The notice reads:
Post-publication, the University of Sydney’s Research Integrity Office found that the article misrepresented research data as being derived from an industry consultancy project when it was from an undergraduate unit of study. In doing so, the work of the undergraduate students and a tutor for the unit of study was misappropriated.
The study also included data from interviews undergraduates had conducted with the public without ethics approval, the retraction notice states.
The article, “The rapid product design and development of a viable nanotechnology energy storage product,” published in the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2019, has accumulated 11 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Four of those citations came after the paper had a correction notice issued for it in 2022.
Cara Wrigley, the senior author on the paper, is now a professor of design at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The study’s first author, Scott Bryant, is based at the University of Sydney. Neither Wrigley nor Bryant responded to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told Retraction Watch that all the study authors agreed to the retraction.
According to the spokesperson, the authors contacted the journal to retract the paper in August 2023, and in December 2023, the University of Sydney also reached out to the publication to support the authors’ decision.
A spokesperson for the University of Sydney told Retraction Watch:
We’re obliged to carry out all research-related investigations on a confidential basis and so we’re not able to provide more information than has been published online in the retraction notice.
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Undergrads? Did they run of grad students or something?
Undergraduates should be quite capable for doing interviews.
But what is weird about this case is not the misappropriation, which is clearly a misconduct, but rather the detail that the “undergraduates had conducted [interviews] with the public without ethics approval”. Since when have interviews required an ethics approval? Given the context of clean production, that is just ridiculous. (Having said that, the actual retraction notice uses a wording “potentially requiring”).