A material science journal has retracted a paper after discovering that the first author faked email addresses for co-authors to submit the paper without their permission. The journal, Materials, also discovered that the 2016 paper had plagiarized material from a 2013 paper previously published in Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A. Here’s the retraction notice for the paper:
A chair of a neurobiology department in China has requested the retraction of a paper on which he was unwittingly listed as the lead and corresponding author. How could a corresponding author — you know, the person with whom the journal corresponds about the paper — be added without their consent? It seems that a fraudulent email account was involved in … Continue reading Fake email for corresponding author forces neuro journal to retract paper
We’ve seen many cases of researchers creating fake email addresses to impersonate reviewers that usher their paper to publication. But in the latest fake email incident, a journal is retracting a paper on liver cancer after the first author created a phony address for the last and corresponding author. Both are researchers at Zhengzhou University in China. This … Continue reading Fake email address — for author, not reviewer — fells another paper
It’s tempting to start calling this a trend. Three Elsevier math journals are among the latest scientific publications to be retracting papers because fake email addresses were used to obtain favorable peer reviews. The three papers appear in two journals: “On two subclasses of (α,β)-metrics being projectively related,” in the Journal of Geometry and Physics; … Continue reading Iranian mathematicians latest to have papers retracted for fake email addresses to get better reviews
Hyung-In Moon, the South Korean plant compound researcher who made up email addresses so he could do his own peer review, is now up to 35 retractions. The four new retractions are of the papers in the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry that initially led to suspicions when all the reviews came back … Continue reading Retraction count grows to 35 for scientist who faked emails to do his own peer review
The case of Hyung-In Moon — the researcher who faked email addresses for potential peer reviewers so he could do his own peer review — has already led to one resignation. Emilio Jirillo, the editor of Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology, which retracted 20 of Moon’s papers, stepped down earlier this year in the wake of the … Continue reading Journal editor resigned in wake of retractions for fake email addresses that enabled self-peer review
Scientists frustrated by the so-called “third reviewer” — the one always asking for additional experiments before recommending acceptance — might be forgiven for having fantasies of being able to review their own papers. But one Korean scientist, Hyung-In Moon, managed to do just that, through what must have seemed like clever subterfuge at the time. … Continue reading South Korean plant compound researcher faked email addresses so he could review his own studies
A researcher in Japan who published at least five papers about a deadly 2016 earthquake faked some of the data, Osaka University announced late last week. Yoshiya Hata resigned his Osaka post and later died, according to media outlet NHK. He claimed to have studied the April 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, which killed at least 50 … Continue reading Late researcher faked Kumamoto earthquake data, university finds
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a highly cited paper on the effects … Continue reading Weekend reads: The fake sex doctor and his bizarre research; prof alleged to have stolen student’s work; worst scientific scandal of all time?
The authors of an much-ballyhooed 2017 paper about the spread of fake news on social media have retracted their article after finding that they’d botched their analysis. The paper, “Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information,” presented an argument for why bogus facts seem to gain so much traction on sites such as … Continue reading Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news turns out to be…fake news