Category: iran 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: [email protected]

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

A first? Dental journal retracts three papers because authors didn’t pay publication charges

dmj_33_1Dental Materials Journal has retracted three papers by different groups of authors for “violation of our publishing policies and procedures” — which turns out to be a polite way of saying “they wouldn’t pay our fees.”

The articles are: Continue reading A first? Dental journal retracts three papers because authors didn’t pay publication charges

Journal grounds paper on radiation exposure in air traffic controllers because it was “published inadvertently”

indjoccenvtmedThe Indian Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine has retracted a 2013 article by a pair of researchers who’d claimed to find that air traffic controllers suffer poor health from exposure to microwave radiation. But that turns out to have been an, um, flight of fancy.

The article, “Adverse health effects of occupational exposure to radiofrequency radiation in airport surveillance radar operators,” was written by Naser Dehghan and Shahram Taeb, both of Shiraz University in Iran. According to the abstract:

Urology researcher in Iran has third paper retracted

safarinejadMohammad Reza Safarinejad, a urologist in Iran, has had three papers retracted recently for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Here’s the most recent notice, from the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, of a paper that has been cited 23 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Urology researcher in Iran has third paper retracted

Fourth retraction for chemists in Iran

commnonlinsciWe’ve found a fourth retraction for a group of chemists in Iran who plagiarized.

As before, the offending article had appeared in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation. This time, however, it did not include a co-author from Ball State University in Indiana, Robert Sammelson, whose name had appeared on three of the earlier papers. Continue reading Fourth retraction for chemists in Iran