Category: rsc publishing

It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year: 

Figure 5: There is an overlap between two images taken from different experimental conditions. I’ve added a version below with the contrast enhanced. It’s difficult to match the brightness perfectly, but all of the same structures can be matched between these two sections. Would the authors comment?

Vincent Rotello of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the corresponding authors, responded right away. “Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention,” Rotello wrote on PubPeer. “We take data integrity seriously and are investigating the origin of the image duplication.”

Continue reading Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

Researchers in India have lost four papers in journals belonging to the Royal Society of Chemistry over concerns that the images in the articles appear to have been doctored. 

The senior author on the articles is  Pralay Maiti, of the School of Material Science & Technology at Banaras Hindu University, in Varanasi. 

“Polycaprolactone composites with TiO2 for potential nanobiomaterials: tunable properties using different phases” was published in 2012 in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, and has been cited 65 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. According to the retraction notice:

Continue reading “[N]o intention to make any scientific fraud” as researchers lose four papers

Ye Zhang, who as we reported yesterday is serving a six-month suspension from her post at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), in Japan, says she did not commit misconduct, as the school contends. 

In response to a query from Retraction Watch, Zhang, a materials scientist, said she did not agree with the findings of an OIST investigation that found she fabricated data and plagiarized in a May 2019 paper in Chemical Communications. (A spokesman for the publisher told us that the journal only recently learned about the OIST report and is looking into the matter.)

In a lengthy email protesting her innocence, Zhang told us: 

Continue reading Okinawa researcher suspended for faking data denies committing misconduct

A pair of researchers in India with a history of stealing a paper from other authors during the peer review process have lost four more articles, this time for questionable data. 

The papers, by Priyadarshi Roy Chowdhury and Krishna G. Bhattacharyya, of Gauhati University in Jalukbari, appeared in journals published by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry. At least some of the hijinks by the pair resulted in a misconduct inquiry by the institution — the report of which one of the authors told Retraction Watch “was completely one-sided and vindictive.”

One of the papers, “Ni/Co/Ti layered double hydroxide for highly efficient photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B and Acid Red G: a comparative study,” was published in 2017 in Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences. According to the notice: 

Continue reading Authors aren’t happy to lose four more papers in chemistry journals