Category: croatia

An author says his work should be “widely heralded and promoted.” So he published it 3 times.

Barislav Momčilović thinks that iodine status is — after iron deficiency — the “main public health” issue in the world today. So when he figured out what he believed was the best way to test levels of the mineral, he was determined to get the message out.

A little too determined, perhaps: He published the same information three times. And one journal caught on.  Last week, Thyroid retracted “Hair Iodine for Human Iodine Status Assessment,” a 2014 paper that they say overlapped with two earlier works.

While publishing duplicate work is considered by some to be just a violation of restrictive publisher copyright agreements, the presence of such duplicates in the literature can bias systematic reviews and other attempts to describe the state of the evidence in a given field. In a retraction notice, Thyroid noted that this was a case of Continue reading An author says his work should be “widely heralded and promoted.” So he published it 3 times.

A new publishing approach — retract and replace — is having growing pains

Ana Marušić

Many journals are adopting a recently developed mechanism for correcting the scientific record known as “retract and replace” — usually employed when the original paper has been affected by honest errors. But if an article is retracted and replaced, can readers always tell? To find out, Ana Marušić at the University of Split School of Medicine in Croatia and her colleagues reviewed 29 “Corrected and Republished Articles” issued between January, 2015 and December, 2016, noting how they were marked by Web of Science, Scopus, and the journals themselves. They report their findings today in The Lancet.

Retraction Watch: You found some inconsistencies in how articles are handled by journals and other databases. What were the most surprising and/or troubling to you?

Continue reading A new publishing approach — retract and replace — is having growing pains

Journalist gets death threats after reporting plagiarism accusations against Croatian official

Damir Krstičević

Plagiarism scandals involving top government officials in the Balkans are not rare. But when Croatia’s defense minister Damir Krstičević was accused last week of plagiarizing parts of his research project, things got ugly.

The minister summoned a press conference within a day, in which he indignantly downplayed any plagiarism accusation and turned the tables by verbally attacking the journalist who first printed the allegations. Following the press conference, the journalist received death threats on social media.

Nenad Jarić Dauenhauer, science reporter for a popular news website, Index.hr, reported how the minister’s 1997/98 paper at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., contained several paragraphs that seemed to be completely copied from two other works.  

Whether the college will act on this new revelation is unclear. The public affairs office hasn’t yet responded to our request for comment.

Continue reading Journalist gets death threats after reporting plagiarism accusations against Croatian official

Engineer: Paper plagiarized my thesis — badly

GeoScience EngineeringAn engineering journal has published a statement by a researcher alleging that a 2015 paper in the same journal plagiarized his thesis — and was so poorly done it “should not have been published.”

In the “counterstatement” to the 2015 paper, Christian Seip of the Rostock University in Germany said the paper — about the development of a Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure (MSDI) in Croatia — took content from his dissertation thesis, about MSDI geoportals in Germany.

In addition, Seip argued that the original paper, “A Framework for Evaluation of Marine Spatial Data Geoportals Using Case Studies,” in GeoScience Engineering (GSE) — shows “major weaknesses” and therefore “should have not been published even [if] it was not plagiarized.”

Seip told us: Continue reading Engineer: Paper plagiarized my thesis — badly

Molecular self-assembly paper fell apart

1049_soft_matter_f2c-900Authors are retracting a 2014 paper about how liquid-crystalline materials self-organize in low temperature conditions after realizing they had measured the temperatures incorrectly.

The error affected three figures and a table in “Milestone in the NTB phase investigation and beyond: direct insight into molecular self-assembly.” The paper, published in Soft Matter, has been cited three times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

The retraction note, published in August, offers more detail as to exactly what went wrong:

Continue reading Molecular self-assembly paper fell apart

“Our real intention was to emphasize, not plagiarize”

joms.13692132This one’s not a retraction, but rather a back and forth of letters to the editor concerning accusations of plagiarism.

Dentists Bryan and Paul Jacobs, a father and son team, wrote a paper describing a novel surgical technique in March 2013. In October 2013, several Croatian dentists published their own paper using the technique.

A year later, the story has gotten a little more interesting. The November issue of the Journal of Oral and Mixillofacial Surgery, which published the second article, has two letters. One, from the Jacobses, accuses the Croatian authors of plagiarism. The second is a response from author Dragana Gabrić Pandurić, claiming “our real intention was to emphasize, not plagiarize, their work.”

Here’s the letter from Bryan and Paul Jacobs (paywalled): Continue reading “Our real intention was to emphasize, not plagiarize”

Fallout from Science’s publisher sting: Journal closes in Croatia

Screen Shot 2013-10-17 at 10.11.01Science‘s John Bohannon has recently revealed the extent of poor or non-existent peer review in some journals that call themselves peer-reviewed, as we reported on here.

Now, an open-access publisher based in Rijeka, Croatia, called InTech, has cancelled its journal that was targeted and exposed by Science’s investigation. The journal was going to charge 400 euros to publish the paper by Bohannon.

The International Journal of Integrative Medicine has been “discontinued”, does “not accept submissions” and “is no longer active” states the publisher’s website.

The notice, posted just a day after Science published its piece, says: Continue reading Fallout from Science’s publisher sting: Journal closes in Croatia

“Breach of warranties” leads to retraction of literacy paper

langideneduYou’d have to be fairly literate to understand the phrase “breach of warranties,” so it’s a good thing it appears in a retraction notice for paper on literacy itself.

The 2012 article, “Information Literacy in Croatia: An Ideological Approach,” appeared in the Journal of Language, Identity & Education, a Taylor & Francis title. The authors were Melita Poler Kovačič, Nada Zgrabljić Rotar and Karmen Erjavec.

Here’s what the abstract had to say: Continue reading “Breach of warranties” leads to retraction of literacy paper

Poignancy in physics: Retraction for “fatal error” that couldn’t be patched

prl-bannerIn August of last year, Mladen Pavičić, chair of physics at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Civil Engineering, published a paper in Physical Review Letters on quantum teleportation, “Near-Deterministic Discrimination of All Bell States with Linear Optics.”

Just six days later, after hearing from a physicist in China, Pavičić — who is also affiliated with Harvard’s physics department — submitted a correction, which ran on the journal’s site in November. The correction begins: Continue reading Poignancy in physics: Retraction for “fatal error” that couldn’t be patched

Surgery journal issues Expression of Concern when institution can’t confirm case study details “for legal reasons”

The editors of the World Journal of Emergency Surgery have published an Expression of Concern about a paper after they couldn’t verify one of the three case reports in it.

Here’s the notice for “Necrotizing fasciitis: literature review of contemporary strategies for diagnosing and management with three case reports: torso, abdominal wall, upper and lower limbs,” by surgeons from Split and Zagreb, Croatia: Continue reading Surgery journal issues Expression of Concern when institution can’t confirm case study details “for legal reasons”