Metals and Materials International has retracted three papers from one author, due to suspicions of plagiarism and authorship issues.
The three papers have one thing in common — the same lead author, Reza Haghayeghi from the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, Iran.
The retraction notices — all released in March, 2016 — lead with the following:
Continue reading Materials journal breaks three papers from the same author
One of the papers in a book of presentations from a computing conference has been pulled after the editors realized the authors never made it to the meeting.
The book was supposed to comprise papers that were presented at the 2nd International Conference on Harmony Search, an algorithm that finds a vector which optimizes a particular function, based on the way musicians harmonize. So, how did material that wasn’t actually presented at the meeting end up in the volume? A spokesperson for the publisher, Springer, explained:
Continue reading Chapter pulled from conference proceedings after authors didn’t attend
A journal is retracting a paper about a heart surgery technique after discovering the researchers did not have ethics approval to perform a the procedure on 130 patients. What’s more, the local cardiac surgical society had asked the first author to stop using the method in 2004, six years before the study was complete.
The patients in the study had atrial septal defects — a congenital hole in their hearts that allows blood to leak between chambers. The retraction note concludes with the editor in chief advising other surgeons to not use the method to close the hole described in the retracted article, “Long-term assay of off-pump atrial septal defect closure using vena caval inflow occlusion and minimally invasive approaches in 130 cases.”
A concern from a reader unraveled the paper. The retraction note explains how:
Continue reading Don’t perform heart surgery described in retracted paper, says editor
A psychiatric journal has pulled a 2014 paper that found electroconvulsive therapy and exercise helped people with depression, after the authors determined they had mistakenly analyzed the wrong data.
According to the retraction notice from the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the researchers had “erroneously analyzed” data from a previous study they had published the year before.
Here’s more from the note for “Electroconvulsive therapy and aerobic exercise training increased BDNF and ameliorated depressive symptoms in patients suffering from treatment-resistant major depressive disorder:” Continue reading Authors used wrong dataset in study on shock therapy, exercise in depression
This version of Hurricane Isaac — based on the force of nature that hit Louisiana in 2012 — didn’t get very far. Atmospheric Research has retracted a paper on a simulation of the hurricane just a few months after it was published.
The paper included two features that commonly get a paper retracted: erroneous data, and a dispute over authorship.
The 2014 paper only has one author: O. Alizadeh-Choobari, a climatologist at the University of Tehran.
Here’s the retraction note, which provides a few more details on what went wrong:
Continue reading “Significant errors in the data” stop Hurricane Isaac paper
A review article about a tool used to link genes to traits and behaviors has been retracted for including content “without permission and/or proper reference.”
Corresponding author Ali Masoudi-Nejad at the University of Tehran told us that the retraction occurred mostly because the paper included many figures and tables from other sources, and he didn’t realize they needed to seek permission from both the author and the copyright-holder (ie, the publisher). He added that he doubts he is the only one to make this mistake: Continue reading Genetics paper retracted for using material “without permission and/or proper reference”
An article about a dietary plan to help people lose weight has been retracted after other researchers raised concerns, and the authors failed to provide the data that supported their findings.
The retraction is accompanied by a Letter to the Editor by a group of outside researchers — including David Allison at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — who noticed “several substantial issues with data and calculations.” For instance, before the experiment even started, the two groups had very different weights: The control group averaged 96.5 kg, and the test group 91 kg. According to the letter, that difference is striking: Continue reading Food article pulled when authors can’t serve up data
How’s this for confusing: A surgery journal is retracting researchers’ response to a letter about their paper, because the letter was never actually published.
According to the managing editor of the Annals of Surgery, the letter — about a 2011 analysis of IV fluids in trauma patients — was accepted, prompting the journal to ask for a response from the authors of the 2011 paper. But the letter-writers never supplied required forms, such as conflict of interest. After spending two years trying to track them down, the journal decided not to publish the letter.
In the meantime, however, the authors’ response to the letter was “inadvertently published,” forcing the journal to retract it. Continue reading Surgery journal publishes — then retracts — response to letter that never appeared
BioMed Central is investigating a recent paper about a potential biomarker for liver cancer, which shows signs it was written using another article as a template.
According to Jeffrey Beall, who exposed the similarities between the two papers on his blog Scholarly Open Access yesterday, the paper in question is “obviously bogus,” and appears to have relied on the “template plagiarism” technique of creating a new article by modifying a previous paper’s text and data.
A spokesperson for BioMed Central, which published the allegedly “junk” paper, as Beall calls it, told us they are looking into the allegations: Continue reading BMC investigating allegedly copied paper
A paper on nematode parasites appears to have been infected with a nasty strain of a publishing problem known as fake peer review. By our count, the phenomenon has felled approximately 250 papers in total.
The affected review, “The important role of matrix metalloproteinases in nematode parasites,” explores a type of enzyme secreted by the parasite. Published in Helminthologia, it’s been cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Unfortunately, the retraction note doesn’t give us too many details about how the peer review process was manipulated:
Continue reading “Rigging of the peer-review process” kills parasite paper