A paper on the characteristics of a photodiode has been retracted corrected because one of the authors “does not want this article for her academic career.”
We don’t often see this kind of reasoning in retraction notices, since adding to one’s publication record is generally a good thing. But occasionally papers do get pulled when researchers are included against their wishes.
Here’s the entire retraction correction note for “Illumination response on the electrical characterizations *Cr/n-GaAs/In photodiode,” published in Optik – International Journal for Light and Electron Optics:
The authors regret to inform that the co-author name should be removed from the article, because Dr Korkut does not want this article for her academic career.
The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.
The 2015 article has been cited only once — by the retraction correction notice — according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
As we noted in a post about such a case involving a paper on p53, to prevent similar issues, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) suggests journals send a note to all authors listed on a paper when it’s submitted, so anyone who objects to being included can resolve the issue before publication.
The first author Ikram Orak, who works at Bingöl University, told us that he didn’t tell Hatun Korkut, who works at Sinop University in Turkey, that he was adding her to the author list. She was the PhD student of one of the co-authors, and she had laid some groundwork for the paper, Orak said:
Dr korkut improved the Cr-GaAs schottky diode and she published a lot of paper. I fabricated Cr-GaAs photodiode by using her recipe, so we added her on author list. this study is different the her study. we were investigated current–voltage (I–V) measurements of Cr/n type–GaAs photodiode and performed under dark, room light and illumination conditions at room temperature.
We’ve reached out to Korkut and to the editor in chief of the journal. We’ll update this post with anything else we learn.
Editor’s note 2:40 PM EST: The article was originally retracted, but appears to have changed to a correction.
We had asked Orak why they retracted the article, rather than correcting it, and he told us:
We do not plan on republishing the article, secondly we think that but it is impossible, so we decided to retract completely from online publishing.
We have reached out to Elsevier for clarification.
Update, 3:10 PM
A spokesperson for Elsevier told us that the article was never meant to be retracted, and that it was labeled as such in error.
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The notice is not a retraction notice but a corrigendum. Did it change or is there a misunderstanding?
Thanks — see the editor’s note now appended to the article.