The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology has issued an “expression of concern” for a 2003 review article, based on a previous lecture, with close echoes to a paper that had appeared in one of The Lancet titles.
Here’s the notice for the article, by Peter Winstanley, dean of the Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom: Continue reading Pharmacology journal expresses concern over “similar, but updated” review
We have long (well, for the past two years) wondered about the pitfalls of publishing in one’s own journal, and here’s a case that illustrates precisely how fraught that practice can be.
The journal Microfluidics and Nanofluidics has retracted a 2010 article, titled “Induced-charge electrokinetic phenomena,” by Dongqing Li and Yasaman Daghighi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, for what appears to be extensive misappropriation of text and data.
As the notice explains: Continue reading Plagiarism costs Canadian lab-on-a-chip researcher a paper — in his own journal
The Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B: Applied Biomaterials is retracting a 2010 paper by Turkish dental researchers for “unattributed overlap.”
We’re pretty sure that’s a euphemism for plagiarism we haven’t heard before — and it raises the question, could you have acceptable, attributed overlap?
The study has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, including by the retraction notice: Continue reading Dental paper pulled for “unattributed overlap”
Family Practice has retracted a 2009 review article on diabetes whose author had published a similar — in spots identical — paper two years earlier in another journal. We think the notice is nine-tenths solid, but there’s a part at the end that raises an important question about how much, or little, editors should do to accommodate the embarrassments of their authors.
The notice:
In April 2011, we praised Psychological Science for its handling of a retraction. At the time, we went as far as to call the retraction notice a “model” of transparency for other journals to follow.
Well, they evidently took that compliment seriously, according to a new retraction notice for a paper by Lawrence Sanna. Sanna left Michigan under a cloud a few months ago after another scientist found his data statistically implausible, as Ed Yong reported in Nature.
The newly retracted paper, “Construing collective concerns: Increasing cooperation by broadening construals in social dilemmas,” was published in 2009 while Sanna was still at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Here’s a sample from the abstract: Continue reading Psychological Science retracts a Sanna paper, citing lawyers, COPE…and Retraction Watch
The European Journal of Surgical Oncology has retracted a meeting abstract that evidently was never meant to be.
The study, by researchers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Good Hope Hospital, both in Birmingham, England, was to be presented at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of Breast Surgery and purported to compare rates of patient satisfaction among women who underwent two kinds of breast reconstruction, TRAM — transverse rectus abdominis myocutaneous — flap and DIEP (short for deep inferior epigastric perforators) flap.
But according to the notice: Continue reading Cancer journal pulls deeply flawed meeting abstract on breast surgery
Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy has retracted a 2011 paper for plagiarism by two authors, one of whom, V. Craig Jordan, is a leading researcher on the class of drugs known as selective estrogen receptor modulators, or SERMs, and is credited with discovering the anti-tumor properties of the breast cancer drug tamoxifen.
Jordan, who is scientific director at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, appears to have been unaware of the offense when the paper was published. Here’s the notice: Continue reading Plagiarism topples paper co-authored by top tamoxifen scientist
Conflict Resolution Quarterly, which we probably all should read but don’t, is retracting a 2010 paper on commercial interactions by a French researcher who combined two other articles into a work he called his own.
But, true to its name, the journal takes a more, shall we say, diplomatic approach to the affair.
Here’s the notice (which, tsk tsk, is behind a paywall): Continue reading Buyer beware: Conflict Resolution Quarterly pulls paper for plagiarism
Here’s a new one that may stoke the debate about whether a paper deserves retraction merely for being wrong or less than fully right.
The journal Cell Biochemistry and Function, a Wiley title, has retracted an article it published earlier this year by a pair of Chinese authors — or, rather, from one author an an unwitting co-author. That authorship issue alone should be enough to warrant a retraction. But the retraction notice also includes a more interesting matter: Continue reading Biochemistry journal retracts paper for being, well, less than conclusive
We apologize for what must seem like a constant drip, drip, drip, but we have three more retractions from Diederik Stapel to report, all from the European Journal of Social Psychology.
The first, in order of publication date, involves a 2006 paper by Stapel and co-author Camille Johnson — whose name has appeared on several other of Stapel’s retracted papers — titled “When nothing compares to me: How defensive motivations and similarity shape social comparison effects.”
The notice reads: Continue reading Three more retractions for Diederik Stapel