A chemistry paper on nanorods that became a lightning rod for criticism on chemistry blogs this week has been retracted.
Here’s the notice for “Chopstick Nanorods: Tuning the Angle between Pairs with High Yield,” originally published in June in Nano Letters by Rajasekhar Anumolu and Leonard F. Pease of the University of Utah: Continue reading Nano Letters retracts chopstick nanorod paper questioned this week on chemistry blogs
The corresponding author of a paper on whether “a sense of shame heightens the desire for money” has retracted it, he claims, after being unable to repeat his analysis to try to fix an issue in the study.
Here’s the notice for “Shame for money: Shame enhances the incentive value of economic resources,” which appeared in Judgment and Decision Making: Continue reading A real shame: Psychology paper retracted when data behind problematic findings disappear
We’ve come across some odd examples of plagiarism in this job, from the fellow who tried to build a CV on the back of another researcher’s work, to the education researcher who, from what we can tell, preferred lifting the work of others to writing her own papers. Here’s another odd one for the pile.
A group of Iranian scholars has lost a paper in Brain Injury because they lifted it wholesale from a previously published article. What’s harder to get one’s mind around, however, is that the two papers were looking at culturally-specific aspects of brain injury. Except that one wasn’t.
The retracted paper, “Frontal acquired brain injury, substance abuse and their common psychological symptoms in the Iranian population,” appeared in 2011. Here’s the abstract, which is still available on the journal’s website (we’ll note that although the abstract is free for all, the retraction notice was behind a pay wall — an error, according to the publisher, which they remedied when we contacted them): Continue reading The brains in Spain fall mainly on…Iran?
Milena Penkowa, the Danish neuroscientist who resigned from the University of Copenhagen in December 2010 amid suspicions of misconduct, has had another paper retracted.
The new retraction appears in Experimental Neurology. Here’s the notice for “M-CSF deficiency leads to reduced metallothioneins I and II expression and increased tissue damage in the brain stem after 6-aminonicotinamide treatment”: Continue reading Penkowa notches fourth retraction, in Experimental Neurology
The South African Review of Sociology has retracted a 1989 paper by an author who must have figured the source — a 1975 article — was sufficiently well removed from institutional memory to catch anyone’s eye.
Evidently that was a safe bet for a generation. But we’re guessing the Internet permitted the detective work that eventually brought the theft to light.
The article was titled (oddly), “Doing the Knowledge in Literature and Sociology,” and its author was P.N.G. Beard, who since 2008 has been group chief education officer at Educor, “the largest provider of private education in Southern Africa.” Beard seems to have written an academic text or two, with titles including “Problems of Pedagogics: Pedagogics and the Study of Education in South Africa,” and “The Child Is Father of the Man: Inaugural Lecture.”
Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading Journal retracts a 24-year-old sociology paper for plagiarism–of a 1975 article
The authors of a 2008 Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) paper have retracted it after a structure was “mistakenly assigned.”
The article, “Highly Enantioselective Radical Addition to N-Benzoyl Hydrazones Using Chiral Ammonium Salts,” was written by Doo Ok Jang and Sang Yoon Kim, chemists at Yonsei University, in Wonju. According to the abstract (which includes this molecular schema):
Continue reading Carbon copies? Authors retract paper from leading chemistry journal
The chemistry blogs have been buzzing this week with the story of a paper in the journal Organometallics that may — or may not — contain fabricated data.
But what makes the story a bit juicier — and yes, it’s sad that fabricated data is a bit ho-hum for us — is that one of the authors of the article appears to have been caught in the act of instructing the first author to make up results.
The article, “Synthesis, Structure, and Catalytic Studies of Palladium and Platinum Bis-Sulfoxide Complexes,” appeared last month and came from a group at the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the University of Zurich. The authors were Emma E. Drinkel, Linglin Wu, Anthony Linden and Reto Dorta.
As ChemBark reported earlier this week:
A group of animal health researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have lost their 2009 paper in the Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology because they’d published the data in at least four other articles.
The paper, “Two Novel Duck Antibacterial Peptides, Avian β-Defensins 9 and 10, with Antimicrobial Activity,” reported that: Continue reading Birds of a feather: Authors who play games with fowl data earn multiple retractions
Two of three authors in Argentina of a 2002 paper purporting to show evidence of bird-like fossil footprints from the Late Triassic age have retracted it after subsequent research suggested their estimates were off.
Here’s the notice for “Bird-like fossil footprints from the Late Triassic:” Continue reading Authors retract Nature paper on bird-like footprints thought to date to Late Triassic
Irony alert: If you’re going to write a paper about face recognition technology, well, do we really need to go on?
A group of researchers in Wuhan, China, evidently didn’t quite realize they were walking into a ridicule trap when they agreed to have their paper, “Face Recognition with Learning-based Descriptor,” published in IERI Procedia. The article appeared in 2012 and was part of an issue devote to that year’s International Conference on Future Computer Supported Education, which took place in Seoul.
And now comes this: Continue reading That face rings a bell, but where have I published it before?