Here’s a new category for us: Poetry.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, a comparative studies journal, has retracted a paper on gender roles in Middle Eastern poetry due to plagiarism.
Nizar Kabbani was a famed Syrian poet who wrote frankly about feminism, love, and sex. He’s well worth a read, if you have the time – here’s an excerpt from one of his more famous poems, I Have No Power: Continue reading Poetry, politics, plagiarism, and erotics add up to a retraction
The editors of PLoS ONE have issued an expression of concern for a 2014 article on a form of nitrogen-fixing bacteria called Bacillus pumilus.
The reason: The company that provided the strain of microbe used in the research won’t let other researchers look at the organism.
The article is titled “Bacillus pumilus Reveals a Remarkably High Resistance to Hydrogen Peroxide Provoked Oxidative Stress,” and it came from a group led by Stefan Handtke, of the University of Greifswald, in Germany.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading PLoS ONE issues expression of concern when company won’t share bacterial strain
Sometimes plagiarism, like an onion, has layers.
That appears to be the case in a paper brought to our attention by sharp-eyed reader Vladimir Baulin, whose work was copied in a 2006 paper that Journal of Biological Physics retracted for plagiarism.
But you can’t keep a good thief down: the plagiarizing authors just popped up in a new journal with a Chinese-language version of their retracted paper, that looks an awful lot like a knock-off. Here’s a note from Baulin: Continue reading Recursive plagiarism? Researchers may have published a duplicate of a study retracted for plagiarism
A publication on a new, tastier dissolving tablet has been retracted for data errors. Here’s the brief notice for “Meloxicam Taste-Masked Oral Disintegrating Tablet with Dissolution Enhanced by Ion Exchange Resins and Cyclodextrin“: Continue reading “Error in data compilation” leaves bitter taste for paper on sweeter-tasting pills
We came across a rather long-toothed retraction in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, which represents a case of doing the right thing (similar to that involving the apparent first-ever English language retraction from 1756, about which we wrote in 2012).
The 1927 notice came in the form of a letter by C. H. Whelden Jr., who was for a time the chief statistician for the American National Red Cross, referencing his 1926 article in the JASA,”The Trend-Seasonal Normal in Time Series:”
Continue reading Dipping into history: An 87-year-old retraction in a statistics journal
A group of urologists in China has lost their 2012 paper in the Journal of Surgical Research because one of the authors was evidently rather naughty.
The article, “Is the impact of the extent of lymphadenectomy in radical prostatectomy related to the disease risk? A single center prospective study,” purported to show that: Continue reading Misconduct prompts retraction of prostatectomy paper
This one comes to us from Twitter, where Willem van Schaik went to express his frustration that a PLOS ONE paper he’d edited had been retracted for fake data.
Two other papers from the same group at the Institute of Microbial Technology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Chandigarh, India, were retracted simultaneously.
We sent van Schaik an email to get a clearer picture of the situation. He responded: Continue reading Three PLOS ONE papers retracted for totally made-up data
You’ve got to love when an author is willing to detail the specifics of an unhelpful retraction notice.
This May, a paper came out in Journal of Thoracic Diseases about drug-resistant tuberculosis. It was retracted in June, for “some misconduct in the manuscript.”
Here’s the notice:
The article “Application status of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry in the identification and drug resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis” (doi: 10.3978/j.issn.2072-1439.2014.02.19) that appeared on page 512-516 of the May 2014 issue of the Journal of Thoracic Disease needs to be withdrawn due to some misconduct in the manuscript. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused.
Since that’s pretty vague and unhelpful, we reached out to corresponding author Jiayun Liu, who gave us a thorough rundown:
Continue reading Author steps in to clarify vague tuberculosis retraction
Researchers at Qingdao University have fully retracted a paper originally published in Molecular Medicine Reports with a clear, detailed outline of what went wrong and how they discovered the error.
Here’s the notice for “Generation of induced pluripotent stem cells using skin fibroblasts from patients with myocardial infarction under feeder-free conditions:”
This one deserves a “w
ow.”
SAGE Publishers is retracting 60 articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control after an investigation revealed a “peer review and citation ring” involving a professor in Taiwan.
[Please see an update on this post.]
Here’s the beginning of a statement from SAGE: Continue reading SAGE Publications busts “peer review and citation ring,” 60 papers retracted