The Journal of Vinyl and Additive Technology (JVAT) — the official journal of the Society of Plastics Engineers — is retracting a 2012 paper from a group of Chinese researchers who evidently realized at some point that they didn’t know quite what they were doing.
As the notice explains: Continue reading Retraction is final destination for epoxy paper marred by “pervasive misattribution of data”
A chemistry journal has retracted a 2006 paper that had knowledgeable researchers scratching their heads from the minute it was published.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Chemistry journal and author retract paper dogged by questions since its publication in 2006
The retraction count continues to grow for a group of Iranian scientists who appear to have published similar work four times.
The group was forced to retract a Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases paper in March. That retraction came alongside one in the New Zealand Journal of Medical Laboratory Science, whose editor had tipped JGLD editor Monica Acalovschi — who has taken a tough stance on duplication in her own journal, published in Romania — off to the duplication. Acalovschi, in turn, tipped off Biochemia Medica, the journal of Croatian Society of Medical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine, which has now retracted a 2009 paper by the group.
The Biochemia Medica retraction, published in its June 2012 issue, says: Continue reading Group’s duplication retractions span the globe, from New Zealand to Romania to Croatia
In circumstances we haven’t quite sorted out, an Australian climate researcher has retracted a paper because he didn’t have the right to use data from a now-shuttered government program.
Ravinesh Deo, of the University of Southern Queensland, published “A review and modelling results of the simulated response of deforestation on climate extremes in eastern Australia” in Atmospheric Researchin May of this year.
Last week, this retraction notice appeared: Continue reading Australian government-funded study of deforestation, climate retracted for intellectual property conflicts
It’s true what they say: You’ve covered one retraction-of-an-early-released-article-about-livestock-semen story, you’ve covered them all.
The Journal of Veterinary Medical Science has retracted an article in published as an early online paper back in August. The paper: “Incidence Study of Brucella abortus and Brucella melitensis in Bovine and Buffalo Semen Samples by Real-Time PCR Assay in Iran.”
The notice: Continue reading Veterinary journal pulls semen paper published (you guessed it) prematurely
On May 11 of this year, Juan Antonio Baeza, an environmental engineering researcher at Universitat Autonoma Barcelona was looking for papers in Water Research about knowledge-based systems, the subject of his 1999 PhD thesis. As he tells Retraction Watch, when he came across “Improving the efficiencies of simultaneous organic substance and nitrogen removal in a multi-stage loop membrane bioreactor-based PWWTP using an on-line Knowledge-Based Expert System”:
I started to read this paper and some sentences of the abstract were interesting, well, really I thought that I would have written that with the same words! But after reading some parts of the paper I realized that those were really my words of a previous paper published in the same journal in 2002.
I started to compare it and around 40-50% of the paper was a direct copy of my paper without changing even a comma.
So he wrote to the journal on May 14: Continue reading How does it feel to have your scientific paper plagiarized? Part 2
It was, as Nature News wrote last month, a story that “seemed too good to be true:”
Stem-cell transplant claims debunked
Transplant of induced pluripotent stem cells to treat heart failure probably never happened
Hisashi Moriguchi, a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, had claimed a result that would have put him years ahead of researchers toiling in stem cell research. But the claims were met with a great deal of doubt — to say the least — and the story began to unravel when Harvard, where Moriguchi said he’d done the work, denied it had ever taken place.
And as expected, the retractions have now started. Today, a Nature Publishing Group journal said they would be retracting two papers, “A therapeutic method for the direct reprogramming of human liver cancer cells with only chemicals” and “Successful cryopreservation of human ovarian cortex tissues using supercooling.” The notices for the Scientific Reports papers will both say the same thing: Continue reading Two Moriguchi stem cell papers being retracted
A group of Dutch researchers has retracted a paper they published in March after apparently learning that they’d bungled their statistical analysis in the study.
The article, “Effects of a pre-visit educational website on information recall and needs fulfilment in breast cancer genetic counselling, a randomized controlled trial,” was published in Breast Cancer Research by Akke Albada of the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research and colleagues.
But according to the notice, Utrecht, we have a problem: Continue reading Intent was there, but not the intention-to-treat analysis: Breast cancer study retracted
European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry has retracted a 2003 paper on the treatment of alcoholism for a vague “copyright violation.” But the reason appears to be that the article was largely identical to a 2002 report from one of the authors and other colleagues.
The offending paper, “Acamprosate and its efficacy in treating alcohol dependent adolescents,” appeared in June 2003 and has been cited 51 times, according to Google Scholar. The authors were Helmut Niederhofer and Wolfgang Staffen, of the Christian Doppler-Klinik, in Salzburg.
According to the rather uninformative notice: Continue reading Make it a double: Alcohol treatment study pulled for duplication
As we’ve noted before, we generally let duplication retractions make their way to the bottom of our to-do pile, since there’s often less of an interesting story behind them, duplication is hardly the worst of publishing sins, and the notices usually tell the story. (These are often referred to — imprecisely — as “self-plagiarism.”)
But that skews what’s represented here — boy, are there a lot of duplication retractions we haven’t covered! — and we might as well be more comprehensive. Plus, our eagle-eyed readers may find issues that we won’t see on a quick scan.
So with this post, we’re inaugurating a new feature here at Retraction Watch, “You’ve been dupe’d.” Every now and then, we’ll gather five of these duplication retractions at a time, and post them so they get into the mix, and into our category listing (see drop-down menu in right-hand column if you haven’t already). Here are the first five: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d: Catching up on authors who liked their work enough to use it again