Category: elsevier

More on Applied Mathematics Letters: Journal retracted paper questioning second law of thermodynamics

Have you read yesterday’s post on a retraction in Applied Mathematics Letters yet? (If you haven’t, you’ve missed the explanation of how “Both science and spirituality came from space,” along with other oddities. We’ll wait while you go read it.) But for those of you who have, it turns out that this wasn’t the first retraction of a bizarre paper in the journal this year.

In January, Granville Sewell, of the University of Texas, El Paso’s math department, published a paper there called “A Second Look at The Second Law.” Its abstract: Continue reading More on Applied Mathematics Letters: Journal retracted paper questioning second law of thermodynamics

Faked data, unsubstantiated claims, and spirituality add up to a math journal retraction

Sometimes, things just don’t add up. Take this retraction notice, from the March 2011 issue of Applied Mathematics Letters:

This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have falsified mathematical findings and have made unsubstantiated claims regarding Euclid’s parallel postulate (Appl. Math. Lett. 23 (2010) 1137–1139. doi:10.1016/j.aml.2010.05.003). This article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

There’s actually only one author, an M. Sivasubramanian, of Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology, Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, India, but we’re not PhDs in math, so we figured we were missing something important. Fortunately, Ben Steinberg, a high school friend of one of ours — Ivan’s — is a bit of a math rock star and a professor at Carleton University. We asked him for his take:

I am not sure which is more amusing, the article or the retraction. I cannot understand how this could possibly be published anywhere. It seems like a practical joke to test whether articles are actually refereed. Not a single statement in the author’s “proof” makes sense. Continue reading Faked data, unsubstantiated claims, and spirituality add up to a math journal retraction

University of Sao Paulo fires professor after a retraction for plagiarism

February has turned out to be a bad month for people found guilty of plagiarism. On Friday, we covered the case of the German foreign defense minister who lost his PhD after his university became aware he had copied passages from newspaper stories into his thesis.

And now we’ve learned that the University of Sao Paolo Paulo (USP) dismissed a full professor earlier this month after an investigation into a study he retracted last year because parts of it had been plagiarized. It has also stripped one of the professor’s former students of her PhD. Continue reading University of Sao Paulo fires professor after a retraction for plagiarism

More on SPIROCOR noninvasive heart disease test: Second retraction (in fact the first) says little

Since we first wrote about the travails of Spirocor’s bedside, noninvasive test for coronary artery disease, we’ve been trying, without much success, to find out more information.

But as they say about every dog, our day has come.

As we initially reported, Ron Waksman, a prominent Washington, D.C. cardiologist and editor-in-chief of Cardiovascular and Revascularization Medicine, was first author of one of two papers about the Spirocor technology that were published in 2010. The other, by Shiyovich, et al, was retracted earlier this month by the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, which triggered our interest in this case.

At the time, we couldn’t find any evidence that Waksman’s article had been retracted, and Waksman has not responded to multiple requests for comment. Today we spoke with Kate Coons, the journal’s managing editor, who told us that the authors had sought a retraction for the article, “An innovative noninvasive respiratory stress test indicates significant coronary artery disease,” in December, and that it had posted one on its website on Jan. 6 of this year. It will be in print in an upcoming issue.

The notice is not available on Medline, but it can be found on ScienceDirect: Continue reading More on SPIROCOR noninvasive heart disease test: Second retraction (in fact the first) says little

Lancet Oncology retracts previously questioned Anil Potti paper

courtesy Duke

Early in December, as the house of cards that is Anil Potti‘s publication record started to really collapse, we called attention to a paper in The Lancet Oncology that had already been the subject of a correction and Expression of Concern in July of last year. Today, the journal officially retracted the paper, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy: a substudy of the EORTC 10994/BIG 00-01 clinical trial.” The paper was cited more than 100 times, according to Google Scholar.

The retraction notice: Continue reading Lancet Oncology retracts previously questioned Anil Potti paper

Why was that paper retracted? Editor to Retraction Watch: “It’s none of your damn business”

L. Henry Edmunds, photo by University of Pennsylvania

Yesterday, we reported on the retraction of a 2004 study in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. As we noted, the notice’s language was, um, fuzzy, referring vaguely to

an investigation by the University of Florida, which uncovered instances of repetitious, tabulated data from previously published studies.

Today, we are slightly more clear, although what we really got was an earful of other language.

We had the pleasure of speaking this morning with L. Henry Edmunds, Jr., the long-time editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, who gave us a better sense of why his retraction notice was so delicately worded. Edmunds, responding to question of why the letter didn’t say more about the matter:

It’s none of your damn business.

Ranting against “journalists and bloggists,” Edmunds, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, said the purpose of the retraction notice was merely Continue reading Why was that paper retracted? Editor to Retraction Watch: “It’s none of your damn business”

Thoracic surgery journal retracts hypertension study marred by troubled data

The Annals of Thoracic Surgery has retracted a 2004 article by a group of Florida researchers who were found by their university to have misrepresented the provenance of their data.

If that construction sounds a trifle precious (er, weasel-y), that’s because the retraction notice does, too: Continue reading Thoracic surgery journal retracts hypertension study marred by troubled data

Penalties for early withdrawal: irked CONSORT Group authors

Premature withdrawal can lead to frustration and hurt feelings — especially when it comes to publications (please, this is a family-friendly site).

Two cases in point: We recently learned that the International Journal of Surgery, an Elsevier title, had withdrawn two papers from the CONSORT group — an acronym for Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials — an international team of scientists who have been working on ways to improve the reporting of studies.

In 2008, they published a paper titled “Methods and processes of the CONSORT Group: example of an extension for trials assessing nonpharmacologic treatments” in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They followed up in March 2010 with the publication of “CONSORT 2010 Statement: Updated guidelines for reporting parallel group randomized trials.”

As they wrote in the statement: Continue reading Penalties for early withdrawal: irked CONSORT Group authors

Update on the Gressner case: Son Olav says he’s the unfairly targeted “bête noire”

We have an update on the case of Olav and Axel Gressner, a father-son (or, in this case, son-father) pair of German liver researchers caught up in a fraud investigation. The inquiry focused on Olav, who left the University of Aachen under a cloud of suspicion. A 2008 research letter on which he was a co-author (his father was senior author) was retracted earlier this year by the Journal of Hepatology.

The journal’s position in the retraction notice,  published online in June and in print in September, bears repeating here. The authors: Continue reading Update on the Gressner case: Son Olav says he’s the unfairly targeted “bête noire”

Academic purgatory: Papers withdrawn before they’re “officially” published

If a paper appears online but then is withdrawn — a kinder, gentler version of retracted — before it is “officially” published, did anyone hear it fall?

Oops, mixed metaphors again. And scare quotes! The latter, however, are because publishers seem to have varying opinions of whether or not something that is freely available online is published. And that has ramifications for whether you can retract a paper like that.

Let us explain with two examples: Continue reading Academic purgatory: Papers withdrawn before they’re “officially” published