Last week, we broke the story of Elsevier’s peer review system being hacked. As we reported, that led to
faked peer reviews and retractions — although the submitting authors don’t seem to have been at fault. As of now, eleven papers by authors in China, India, Iran, and Turkey have been retracted from three journals.
After our post, Elsevier’s Tom Reller filled in some details in a post at Elsevier Connect: Continue reading Was Elsevier’s peer review system hacked to get more citations?
We recently wrote about a group of English scientists who asked Toxicology to de-publish their abstract from a conference proceedings issue. Turns out they were far from alone.
The journal’s December issue has at least five more such removal notices, all for the same problem.
The notices read: Continue reading De-Toxicology: Authors pull more meeting abstracts, citing journal error
As Werner Heisenberg famously conjectured, you can’t measure an atomic particle’s momentum and position at the same time. But perhaps the principle named for the German physicist and godfather of quantum mechanics should be applied to another important scientific truth: you can’t publish the same article in two different but competing journals.
Just ask a group led by Ted Sargent, a prominent physicist at the University of Toronto. He and his colleagues recently lost a paper in Thin Solid Films — which sounds like it ought to be the name of an indie movie company, dibs! — on quantum dot solar cells. (If those sound familiar to readers of this blog, there’s a good reason. We wrote about the retraction of another quantum dot paper, this one in Nature Photonics, in October of this year.)
Sargent’s article, “Advances in colloidal quantum dot solar cells: The depleted-heterojunction device,” which he wrote with colleagues in Spain and Switzerland, appeared in August 2011. According to the notice: Continue reading Quantum physicists learn about Heisenberg’s (publishing) uncertainty principle the hard way
For several months now, we’ve been reporting on variations on a theme: Authors submitting fake email addresses for potential peer reviewers, to ensure positive reviews. In August, for example, we broke the story of a Hyung-In Moon, who has now retracted 24 papers published by Informa because he managed to do his own peer review.
Now, Retraction Watch has learned that the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) was hacked sometime last month, leading to faked peer reviews and retractions — although the submitting authors don’t seem to have been at fault. As of now, eleven papers by authors in China, India, Iran, and Turkey have been retracted from three journals.
Here’s one of two identical notices that have just run in Optics & Laser Technology, for two unconnected papers: Continue reading Elsevier editorial system hacked, reviews faked, 11 retractions follow
The journal System evidently needs a new one — at least when it comes to production.
The publication has been forced to retract an article that it published twice — in the same issue.
Here’s what happened: Continue reading Failure at System — systems failure? — leads to duplicate publication, retraction
Neuroscience has retracted a 2009 paper by a team of Korean sports researchers for what appear to be figure irregularities. But the journal’s handling of the case is puzzling and unhelpful.
The article, “Treadmill exercise improves cognitive function and facilitates nerve growth factor signaling by activating mitogen-activated protein kinase/extracellular signal-regulated kinase1/2 in the streptozotocin-induced diabetic rat hippocampus,” came out of Korea National Sport University, among others. It seemed to suggest that exercise could make diabetic rats smarter.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading “Serious errors” in figures prompt concerning Neuroscience retraction
Neuroscience has an amusing correction in one of its December issues, involving a paper that appeared in its November 2011 issue on Parkinson’s disease by a group from Germany.
As the notice explains: Continue reading Irritation turns to aggravation in Neuroscience correction
What do you do when a math paper that contains some “constructions and arguments [that] make no sense mathematically” gets published?
If you’re Applied Mathematics Letters, you retract the paper, “For the origin of new geometry.” Here’s the notice: Continue reading Math paper retracted because some of it makes “no sense mathematically”
In October, we noted the apparent record holder for longest time between publication and retraction: 25 years, for “Retention of the 4-pro-R hydrogen atom of mevalonate at C-2,2′ of bacterioruberin in Halobacterium halobium,” published in the Biochemical Journal in 1980 and retracted in 2005. (Although an author requested that another 52-year-old paper be retracted, it remains untouched in the literature.)
That record has now been broken. Congratulations to the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the authors of a December 1985 paper, “Increasing the response rate to cytotoxic chemotherapy by endocrine means.” Here’s the notice, which appears in the January 2013 issue of the journal, making 27 years — and a month, if you’re counting: Continue reading A new record: A retraction, 27 years later
It never pays to take a closer look at the inside of a chicken nugget.
The journal Food Chemistry has retracted a 2010 article by Iranian researchers who claimed to have used spectroscopy to examine the inner workings of breaded-fried chicken nuggets. Trouble was, someone else had already done the work.
Issues with the paper first surfaced in March, in the form of a correction that should have given the editors serious indigestion: Continue reading Which came first? Plagiarism flap forces retraction of chicken nugget paper