Oops: Math journal retracts paper accepted by “accidental administrative error”

Math journal editors can add — but they can also subtract.

That’s what happened to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (JMAA), “On the fractional Ostrowski inequality with uncertainty.”

Here’s the notice:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy)

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

An accidental administrative error sent out an Accept decision to the author. The handling editor sincerely apologizes for his error in the processing of this manuscript.

We’ve tried to reach the corresponding author of the paper, and will update with anything we learn.

The last time we wrote about the JMAA, it was because the journal was one of those that published studies mistakenly after the Elsevier peer review system was hacked. Elsevier tells us this error was unrelated.

Here’s the conclusion of the paper, in case you were wondering:

Investigating some problems in fractional case under uncertainty have been considered widely. To do so, we investigated the well-known inequality,the so-called fractional Ostrowski inequality under uncertainty. In this regard, the left and the right fuzzy fractional integrations and differentiation in Caputo sense have been obtained. Then, some useful results are proved.