Not surprisingly, the year that saw our database surpass 20,000 retractions was a busy one for us. In what has become an annual tradition, our friends at The Scientist asked us to round up what we thought were the biggest retractions of the last 12 months.
Head on over to see our picks.
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“9. Call them peer review pirates. A pair of researchers in India was caught having stolen a paper during the review process and publishing it under their own names in a journal run by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry. The 2017 article, which appeared in CrystalEngComm, was ostensibly written by Priyadarshi Roy Chowdhury and Krishna G. Bhattacharyya, of Gauhati University in Jalukbari. But according to the journal, the work had “striking similarities” to a manuscript by two other scientists submitted to the journal Dalton Transactions that one of the authors had reviewed. CrystalEngComm retracted the offending article.”
Four other Chowdhury-Bhattacharyya papers in RSC journals have their own Pubpeer threads. One has been retracted from RSC Advances after the authors’ institution investigated it and concluded that images were fake: https://pubpeer.com/publications/4A894F4B3343AD0F9CCB864DE98522
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/ra/2019/c9ra90011j
The other three papers used the same images, but no action has been taken.