Category: elsevier

Elsevier on Retraction Watch: “scholarly publishing is better for it”

It’s fair to say that we’ve been watching Elsevier over the past two-plus years, and we’ve also known they’ve been watching us. Last year, Tom Reller, the company’s vice president of global public relations, wrote that we “represent the new breed of science watchdog that is able to promote the results of their own investigations quickly via the internet.”

But as Reller notes in a thoughtful post today at ElsevierConnect: Continue reading Elsevier on Retraction Watch: “scholarly publishing is better for it”

Radioactive fish study retracted for “significant and extensive” corrections

The authors of a study estimating how much radioactive material from two sunken Russian submarines is taken up by fish in the Barents Sea have retracted it, citing the need for “significant and extensive” corrections.

Here’s the notice, from Environmental Pollution: Continue reading Radioactive fish study retracted for “significant and extensive” corrections

Bad vibrations: Composites paper pulled after subsequent, duplicate article appears

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering is retracting a 2011 paper by an Italian researcher who submitted a similar article to another journal. What makes this interesting is that the retracted article appears to be the one that was published first.

The article, “Free vibrations of laminated composite doubly-curved shells and panels of revolution via the GDQ method,” was written by Francesco Tornabene, an engineer at the University of Bologna and has been cited five times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. As the notice explains: Continue reading Bad vibrations: Composites paper pulled after subsequent, duplicate article appears

Three gynecologic cancer studies retracted for figure duplication, image manipulation

A gynecologic cancer researcher at Oita University in Japan has retracted three papers by his group after the discovery of duplicated figures and manipulated images.

The three papers by Noriyuki Takai and colleagues all appeared in Gynecologic Oncology: Continue reading Three gynecologic cancer studies retracted for figure duplication, image manipulation

Legal medicine journal pulls paper over image goof

Irony alert: The Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, which really ought to know better, is retracting a 2012 article by an Australian researcher that threatened to run afoul of…privacy law.

The article, “A challenging injury interpretation: Could this be a stab wound?” was written by Les Griffiths, of the Clinical Forensic Medical Unit at University of Queensland in Brisbane. According to the notice: Continue reading Legal medicine journal pulls paper over image goof

Solar energy paper retracted for text, data misuse

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews has retracted a 2008 paper by a group from the United States and Botswana, citing plagiarism and unauthorized use of data.

The article, “Solar chimney power generation project—The case for Botswana,” discussed a project by the Botswanan military to develop a power plant based on the chimney design. The paper is no longer available online, but we found this Wikipedia entry that mentions it: Continue reading Solar energy paper retracted for text, data misuse

Journal “mistake” forces removal of toxicology study by leading scientist

We’ve seen this movie before: Researchers present a study at a scientific meeting, then learn to their surprise (and, sometimes, chagrin) that a journal has published the data in a supplement or other edition.

That’s the case with a group of UK scientists whose abstract for a meeting of the British Toxicology Society wound up in the journal Toxicology — only to be expunged when they complained.

The work was titled “Molecular mechanisms involved in resistance of CLL cells towards ABT-737, a specific BCL-2 inhibitor.” Gerald Cohen, of the University of Leicester, who led the study, told us: Continue reading Journal “mistake” forces removal of toxicology study by leading scientist

Iranian mathematicians latest to have papers retracted for fake email addresses to get better reviews

It’s tempting to start calling this a trend.

Three Elsevier math journals are among the latest scientific publications to be retracting papers because fake email addresses were used to obtain favorable peer reviews.

The three papers appear in two journals: “On two subclasses of (α,β)-metrics being projectively related,” in the Journal of Geometry and Physics; and “Complex Bogoslovsky Finsler metrics” and “Sasaki–Randers metric in Finsler geometry,” in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. All three share authors Akbar Tayebi, of the University of Qom, Iran, and Esmaeil Peyghan, of Arak University, also in Iran.

The notices in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications read as follows (the EES refers to the Elsevier Editorial System): Continue reading Iranian mathematicians latest to have papers retracted for fake email addresses to get better reviews

Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters

We’re not sure how many you need for a “slew,” but we’ve seen five retractions in Neuroscience Letters recently, most of them because researchers republished translations of papers in English, so we thought we’d round them up in a post.

We’ll start the count — appropriately, we think — with the notice for “Simple mental arithmetic is not so simple: An ERP study of the split and odd–even effects in mental arithmetic“, published in February by researchers from Nanjing Normal University in China: Continue reading Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters

Fired Kalasalingam prof Gurunathan’s retraction count stands at eight

We’ve found another retraction for a paper bySangiliyandi Gurunathan, the former researcher at Kalasalingam University in India fired over multiple instances of data fabrication that also caused six Ph.D. students to get kicked out of their program.

The retraction was published In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology – Animal in October 2011 but we only saw it last month. It reads, in full: Continue reading Fired Kalasalingam prof Gurunathan’s retraction count stands at eight