Category: iran retractions

Flood paper washed away after “oversight” leads to publication of wrong manuscript

JEHSEThe editor of the Journal of Environmental Health Science and Engineering has retracted a paper mapping flood zones in Iran because the authors mistakenly uploaded a manuscript that had already been published elsewhere.

According to corresponding author Majid Bagheri of K.N. Toosi University of Technology in Tehran, a different paper on wastewater treatment was accepted and peer-reviewed at JEHSE, but then the authors uploaded the wrong manuscript, and that manuscript, on flood zones, made it all the way through acceptance and publication due to an “oversight.”

The retracted version of the paper was published online on December 27, 2014 in JEHSE, a BioMed Central title. The preceding, non-retracted version, was published online at the Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering just four days earlier, on December 23, 2014.

Here is Bagheri’s account: Continue reading Flood paper washed away after “oversight” leads to publication of wrong manuscript

Asphalt paper paved over for allegedly plagiarizing a student’s thesis

PSTThe publishers of the journal Petroleum Science and Technology have retracted a paper because one of the authors “did not agree to co-author this manuscript,” and did not even communicate with the other three authors.

According to one involved party, the problem is bigger than just lack of communication: The paper, “Fatigue and Low Temperature Fracture in Bitumen Mastic,” authored by a dean of civil engineering in Iran, was “copied word for word” from a Canadian student’s master thesis, according to the student’s advisor.

Three of the authors on the paper are engineers at the Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University in Tehran, Iran, including the dean of civil engineering, Saeed Ghaffarpour Jahromi. The fourth author, B. J. Smith, is listed as a member of the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Continue reading Asphalt paper paved over for allegedly plagiarizing a student’s thesis

Bully for you! Duplication earns demerit for school cruelty paper

Trauma-kashan3Archives of Trauma Research has retracted a 2014 paper on bullying by a group in Iran who appear to have been double-fisted in their approach to publishing.

The article, “Epidemiological Pattern of Bullying Among School Children in Mazandaran Province, Iran,” was written by researchers from Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, in Tehran. Its conclusions:

Different forms of bullying have a distinct nature and the epidemiological pattern indicates that bullying exists in the Iranian schools. Thus, the effective bullying prevention and appropriate intervention programs are recommended.

Here’s the notice:

Continue reading Bully for you! Duplication earns demerit for school cruelty paper

Urology researcher in Iran up to six retractions

safarinejadA urologist in Iran has lost three papers in BJU International, bringing his retraction count to a half-dozen.

In December 2013, we reported on three retractions by Mohammad Reza Safarinejad. None of those notices, about papers related to incontinence and erectile dysfunction, made the reasons for retraction very clear. After that post ran, Safarinejad told us that Hartmut Porst, former president of the European Society for Sexual Medicine, had raised questions about the data in a number of his papers. Porst confirmed that for us earlier this month.

All of the latest papers, about aspects of male sexual dysfunction, are being retracted due to “inappropriate” statistical analyses.

Here’s the notice for “Analysis of association between the 5-HTTLPR and STin2 polymorphisms in the serotonin-transporter gene and clinical response to a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (sertraline) in patients with premature ejaculation,” which has been cited 17 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Urology researcher in Iran up to six retractions

Genetics journal isn’t down with O.P.D. – stealing other people’s data

GMR logoGenetics and Molecular Research, an online-only journal, has retracted two articles about gastric cancer by a group of Iranian researchers who appear to have put their own names on other people’s data.

Both articles were published in 2014. One was titled “Absolute quantification of free tumor cells in the peripheral blood of gastric cancer patients;” the other, “ZNF797 plays an oncogenic role in gastric cancer.” The list of authors on the two papers isn’t identical, but both papers share a few in common, including the same two last authors: F. Ghasemvand and S. Heidari-Keshel.

It turns out, Saeed Heidari-keshel wasn’t down with other people’s data, and alerted the journal to the problem.

Here’s more from the retraction notice for the first article, which was found to be “substantially equal” to another paper: Continue reading Genetics journal isn’t down with O.P.D. – stealing other people’s data

Acid studies burned by duplication test in corrosion papers

ldis20.v034.i07.coverPetroleum engineers in Iran have lost a pair of papers in the Journal of Dispersion Science and Technology for duplication and misuse of data.

The authors, whose various and varying affiliations include the National Iranian Oil Company, the Iranian Offshore Oil Company and Karaj Azad University, appear to have plagiarized not once, but twice: Two 2014 papers are both “substantially similar” to a 2013 paper, all published in the same journal. Which says plenty about both parties, we think.

What’s more, both retracted papers lifted data from a 2013 article in another journal, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, “without proper citation.”    Continue reading Acid studies burned by duplication test in corrosion papers

Journal runs retraction, editorial over duplicate submission of pathology paper

WebCurrentCoverThe International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine has taken a hard stance against overlapping publications in a recent retraction note and editorial.

Shortly after publishing a paper about the glycosylation patterns of endothelial cells in usual interstitial pneumonia, IJOEM editors discovered that it had been accepted by the Scholarly Journal of Biological Science two weeks before it was submitted to the IJOEM.

According to two authors we reached via email, Abolfazl Barkhordari and Carolyn Jones, SJBS requested a $300 publication fee, which Barkhordari (a corresponding author) was unable to pay due to economic sanctions against Iran, where he is based.

Barkhordari provided us with an email from the SJBS stating that the paper would not be published until $300 was transferred into a Nigerian bank account. The Nigeria-based publisher, Scholarly Journals, is on Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory open access publishers.

Barkhordari and Jones assumed the SJBS was a dead end, so submitted the paper elsewhere.

Continue reading Journal runs retraction, editorial over duplicate submission of pathology paper

Math paper subtracted for plagiarism

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 1.02.16 PMISPACS’ Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Application, whose website promises “very fast publication,” has pulled a paper for ripping off an article posted on arXiv.org.

Their plagiarism wasn’t exactly subtle. Here’s the abstract from the paper on arXiv.org:

We introduce and study the class of weak almost limited operators. We establish a characterization of pairs of Banach lattices E, F for which every positive weak almost limited operator T:E→F is almost limited (resp. almost Dunford-Pettis). As consequences, we will give some interesting results.

And here’s the abstract from the retracted paper:

Continue reading Math paper subtracted for plagiarism

Linguistics retraction fails to speak clearly

ccse logoThe Canadian Center of Science and Education has put out a truly useless retraction for a paper published in June 2010 in their journal English Language Teaching.

Here’s the notice for “A Solution to Plato’s Problem: Faculty of Language as A Complex Non-Linear System”:

The editorial board announced this article has been retracted on August 18, 2010.

If you have any further question, please contact us at: elt@ccsenet.org

So we tried that email. We had a very odd back and forth with editorial assistant Gavin Yu, who responded to a request for more details with the following: Continue reading Linguistics retraction fails to speak clearly

Plagiarism makes renewable energy paper unsustainable

rserHere’s a lesson for would-be authors of papers on power supplies:

Energy = Renewable; Journal articles = Not renewable

Too late for a group of engineers in Iran who borrowed too liberally from previously published work in their 2013 article in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

The paper, “A review of energy storage systems in microgrids with wind turbines,” reported that: Continue reading Plagiarism makes renewable energy paper unsustainable