SpringerPlus has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Saudi mathematicians who lifted text and figures from previously published articles.
The paper, “On soft expert topological spaces,” appeared in October 2012. According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Plagiarism leads to retraction of math paper
Last month we wrote about a paper in Nature Photonics that, because of a measurement error, had to be retracted.
It turns out that wasn’t the only problem with the article — but we’re afraid that the glitch requires us to issue a correction.
The article, “Greatly enhanced continuous-wave terahertz emission by nano-electrodes in a photoconductive photomixer,” has listed Aaron Danner as the last — and, we’d assumed — senior author of the paper. But as Danner pointed out to us, that was a mistake by Nature Photonics.
A pair of Iranian physicists is facing the retraction of one of their papers after editors found out some of the work was plagiarized from two textbooks and an encyclopedia.
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Plagiarism of textbooks, encyclopedia leads to physics retraction
Whose business are the reasons behind a retraction?
Our readers will no doubt know by now that we think they’re basically everyone’s — at least if journals want us to believe that they’re interested in maintaining the integrity of the scientific record. But not all editors seem to agree. Hank Edmunds, for example, didn’t in early 2011, telling us, “It’s none of your damn business.” A chemistry journal editor said, in a similar vein, “the purpose of keeping these retraction notices slim is not to produce too much detail.”
Now, a psychology journal editor joins those ranks. Here’s the notice in question: Continue reading Editor on retraction details: “I do not think this is the business of anyone but our journal, please”
A University of Wisconsin scientist who was found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have faked data in two papers, has had a second study retracted.
Here’s the notice: for “Secretory phospholipase A2 IIA is up-regulated by TNF-α and IL-1α/β after transient focal cerebral ischemia in rat,” by Rao Adibhatla and colleagues and originally published in Brain Research in February 2007: Continue reading Second retraction appears for University of Wisconsin neuroscientist who faked images
Every now and then, we see retraction notices that refer vaguely to legal issues. Sometimes, we can dig up the actual reason. But the European Biophysics Journal has two retractions that leave us completely in the dark.
The two notices basically say the same thing. Here’s one: Continue reading “Unsolved legal reasons” cause retraction of two biophysics papers
Last week, we covered the complicated story of a paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues that had been removed — or at least all but the abstract — from its publisher’s site. Our angle on the story was how Frontiers, which publishes Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, where the study appeared, had handled the withdrawal. It happened without any notice, and no text appeared to let the reader know why the paper had vanished.
Today, Frontiers posted a note to readers on top of the paper’s abstract: Continue reading Update: Lewandowsky et al paper on conspiracist ideation “provisionally removed” due to complaints
Quick updates on work by two people whose names appear frequently on Retraction Watch: Diederik Stapel and Ulrich Lichtenthaler.
Last month, we reported on the 50th retraction for Stapel. Here’s number 51 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, for “The flexible unconscious: Investigating the judgmental impact of varieties of unaware perception:” Continue reading Frequent Retraction Watch fliers rack them up: Stapel hits 51, Lichtenthaler scores number 9
A pair of engineers at Hohai University in Nanjing, China, has lost their 2012 paper in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. The reason: The article, “Study of the New Leon model for concrete failure,” wasn’t theirs to publish.
According to the retraction notice (which is dated September 2013 but has already appeared in ScienceDirect): Continue reading Retraction for water researchers who ripped off dissertation
Laurence Cole, an obstetrics researcher at the University of New Mexico, made an appearance on this blog in November 2011 after the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published a remarkably heavy-handed retraction of one of his papers.
Shortly after, we learned that the retraction was preceded by a strongly-worded letter from an attorney representing a company that had been miffed by the content of Cole’s article (the issue involved the effectiveness of commercially-available pregnancy tests, and Cole’s failure to adequately disclose a past relationship with the aggrieved company’s competitor). That letter read, in part: Continue reading New Mexico obstetrics researcher violated research subject protocols: Retraction notice