A researcher has retracted a 2009 chemistry paper after discovering that a figure had been “inappropriately edited.”
According to the journal, a reader brought the images in question in Figure 1 to the editors’ attention last September. Timothy P. Lodge, distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis — and editor of Macromolecules through December 2017 — told Retraction Watch:
Continue reading Author retracts 2009 chemistry paper with “heavily doctored” images
Several years ago, a group of four chemists believed they had stumbled upon evidence that contradicted a fairly well-established model in fluid dynamics.
Between 2013 and 2015, the researchers published a series of four papers detailing their results — two in ACS Macro Letters and two in Macromolecules. Timothy P. Lodge, the journals’ editor and a distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, explained that the results were “somewhat controversial,” because they appeared to contradict the generally accepted model for how some polymer fluids move.
Indeed, the papers sparked debate between the authors and other experts who questioned the new data, arguing it didn’t upend the previous model.
Then, in 2015, the authors realized their critics might be correct. Continue reading Chemistry papers challenged a paradigm — until the authors spotted a pivotal error