A group of scientists at the Chinese Earthquake Administration in Beijing have lost their 2014 paper in Nature Scientific Reports for lifting chunks of text from a previously published article.
The abstract of the paper, “Early magnitude estimation for the MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake using progressively expanded P-wave time window,” states: Continue reading Far from earth-shatteringly new: Plagiarism topples Chinese quake paper
Back in November 2013, we wrote about a correction in PNAS about a May 2012 paper by a group from Toronto and Mount Sinai in New York who, as we said at the time
had been rather too liberal in their use of text from a previously published paper by another researcher — what we might call plagiarism, in a less charitable mood.
Continue reading Authors get away with throwing quotation marks around plagiarized passages. Again.
Tyndale House says it will be recalling copies of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven after the boy in question, Alex Malarkey (yes, that’s really his name), said he didn’t make the trip after all.
Malarkey made the claim after having been injured in a car accident when he was 6. The book became a best-seller for Tyndale, which, according to NPR, called it Continue reading Heaven still waiting: Publisher pulls book after boy recants on visit to heaven
The Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy has retracted a 2014 paper by a group of South Korean researchers after determining that the authors had doubled up on their publishing odds by submitting the manuscript to a competing journal.
The article was titled “A comparative study of low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with or without chemical peeling using Jessner’s solution in melasma patients,” and it purported to find that:
This study suggests Jessner’s peel is a safe and effective method in the early course of treatment for melasma when combined with low-fluence 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG laser.
Continue reading Duplicate submission forces retraction of derm laser paper
A computer scientist in India has lost a 2013 paper on satellite imaging because he submitted — and published — essentially the same article three times.
The researcher, P.V. Arun, came to the attention of the Indian media last year after it emerged that he had lied about winning a post with NASA and other aspects of his resume. According to the News Minute, Arun boasted that he: Continue reading Duplication retraction appears for ‘NASA Patriot Boy’ turned Indian scandal source
In April 2014, we wrote about the case of a former hydrologist at the University of Kansas (KU), Marios Sophocleous, who had plagiarized in at least seven studies, two of which were retracted by the journal Ground Water.
At the time, we mentioned two other articles, in the Hydrogeology Journal, that appeared destined for retraction — not least because KU requested that the journal yank them. But in a rather surprising move, the journal is declining to do so, and another publication, the Journal of Hydrology, is taking the same approach.
Here’s the notice from Hydrogeology Journal editor Clifford Voss: Continue reading Water under the bridge? Hydrology journals won’t retract plagiarized papers despite university request
Take us at our word when we tell you this isn’t some exercise in meta-irony or meta-criticism or any other meta-bullshit, but a pair of researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia have published a paper calling for an end to irony in science.
First, some background: In 2001, an Israeli researcher named Leonard Leibovici wrote a letter to the famously lighthearted Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal describing a randomized controlled trial in which intercessory prayer at a distance — in other words, people praying for other, sick people — was found to improve the health of patients with bloodstream infections. All the more remarkable was that this prayer was “retroactive,” as in, it purportedly occurred years after those sick patients had either left the hospital or died. Continue reading Does irony have a place in science?
A group of gastroenterology researchers in Italy has lost their 2010 paper in Internal and Emergency Medicine, the journal of the Italian Society of Internal Medicine, for plagiarizing and duplicate publication.
The article, “Gut microbiota and related diseases: clinical features,” was published as a supplement by a team from the University of Bologna. Its conclusions: Continue reading Mix-and-match text topples microbiome paper
In April 2012, we wrote about a case of disputed authorship and misused data involving one Varun Kesherwani, a former postdoc at the University of Nebraska.
As we reported then, Kesherwani was first author of a paper in Cytokine. The second author, Ajit Sodhi, of Banaras Hindu University, claimed to have had no knowledge of the article and had not given Kesherwani permission to use the results. Thus, the retraction.
Since then, we have received numerous messages from Kesherwani objecting to our post — he claims it has hurt his employment prospects — and demanding that we take it down. At one point he even suggested in an email that we pay him to go away: Continue reading Former postdoc threatens Retraction Watch with lawsuit over vague defamation claims
Fuel, an Elsevier title, has pulled an article on coal pollution because the authors took much of the work from an earlier paper of theirs in another journal.
The article, “Co-firing of coal and biomass: Development of a conceptual model for ash formation prediction,” was published in September by a group from Australia and The Netherlands.
According to the notice: Continue reading Non-renewable resource: Fuel yanks paper for duplication