“Unethical behavior” breaks crystallography paper

Molecules and Cells

A 2011 paper about the crystal structure of a transcription regulator has been pulled by Molecules and Cells for “unethical behavior by the authors.”

Unfortunately, we can’t say much more than that, because the notice doesn’t, either:

This article has been retracted due to unethical behavior by the authors.

We got a little bit more out of a spokesperson for Springer, the journal’s publisher, who told us that the paper was pulled for plagiarism.

The article was retracted due to unethical behavior (plagiarism) by the authors.

The abstract for “Human MTERF3 crystal structure forms a left-handed superhelix” doesn’t appear to be available online, despite recommendations from the Committee on Publication Ethics that journals not remove retracted articles. The paper isn’t listed on Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’ve contacted last author Hyun-Soo Cho at Yonsei University in South Korea, and will update if we receive a reply.

Hat tip: Rahul Shelake

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One thought on ““Unethical behavior” breaks crystallography paper”

  1. The abstract for “Human MTERF3 crystal structure forms a left-handed superhelix” doesn’t appear to be available online

    This purports to be it (for now, anyway). Cursory Google searching doesn’t turn up any exact matches for various substrings, but no doubt more sophisticated tools could be applied.

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