Category: springer retractions

“Great shock and sadness:” Publishing gadfly to retract paper for duplication

untitledA vociferous advocate for correcting the literature — who has been banned by two publishers for his persistent communications — has asked journals to retract one paper and correct three others for duplications.

After a reader flagged his 2004 paper on PubPeer last month, author Jaime Teixeira da Silva “immediately” contacted the journal to alert it that the paper had been duplicated, as he noted on a recent comment on our site:

Continue reading “Great shock and sadness:” Publishing gadfly to retract paper for duplication

A prominent psychiatry researcher is dismissed. What’s happening to his papers?

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Alexander Neumeister. Source: Yale School of Medicine

After a prominent researcher was dismissed due to multiple instances of misconduct in his studies, how are journals responding?

When an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found multiple issues with the work of psychiatry researcher Alexander Neumeister, New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center shut down eight of his studies. (Disclosure: The author of this post is an NYU journalism student, but has no relationship with the medical school.) The agency concluded the studies, which involved using experimental drugs to relieve symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), were tainted by lax oversight, falsified records, and inaccurate case histories, according to the New York Times. (Neuroskeptic also recently analyzed the case.)

We reached out to the journals that have published Neumeister’s papers, to ask if these recent events have caused them to take a second look at his work. Several have responded, with some noting they plan to investigate, or will do so if asked by the institution. But many believe there is little cause for concern. Continue reading A prominent psychiatry researcher is dismissed. What’s happening to his papers?

You’ve been dupe’d (again): Do these data look familiar? They are

plant_growth_regulationWe can’t keep up with the growing number of retraction notices, so we’ve compiled a list of recent duplications to update our records.

1. Authors don’t always intentionally duplicate their own work, of course. The first paper on our list was retracted after the authors included a figure from a previous paper by accident, according to the publisher: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d (again): Do these data look familiar? They are

Author, among others, loses four papers for “compromised” peer review

Annals of human geneticsJournals have retracted four papers from an author after uncovering evidence the peer review process had been compromised. Three papers have all common authors. 

In one notice, issued last month, Annals of Human Genetics said it had reason to believe the paper had been reviewed by unqualified reviewers. Last year, another journal, Molecular Biology Reports, pulled two papers by the same group — all based at the China Medical University in Shenyang — all for peer-review issues. Additionally, Molecular Biology Reports also retracted another paper co-authored by Peng Liu last year, which did not include her other colleagues on the three other papers. All papers describe the epigenetic changes — modifications in expressions of genes — that may underlie cancer.

Here’s the retraction notice in the Annals of Human Genetics, published June 27: Continue reading Author, among others, loses four papers for “compromised” peer review

Patients did not okay publishing brain surgery details

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BioMed Central has retracted a paper after realizing it shared details on the brain surgeries of four patients without their consent.

Darlene Lobel, a neurosurgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, agreed to the retraction, and told us she didn’t know that she needed consent from the patients since all identifying details had been removed. The paper describes a technique for craniotomy — opening up the skull to access the brain — and included CT scans of hemorrhaging and swelling that the patients experienced, as well as other details such as their gender and age.

Here’s the retraction notice:

Continue reading Patients did not okay publishing brain surgery details

Plagiarism, plagiarism, plagiarism: Five recent cases

RW logoThere’s so much publishing news to report, we don’t always get to cover every retraction when it appears. To get the word out more quickly, sometimes we publish a group of papers pulled for similar reasons, such as duplications. Below, we present five recent cases of plagiarism, such as using text or figures that the authors didn’t originally write.

We’ve added the date of retraction where we could find it:
Continue reading Plagiarism, plagiarism, plagiarism: Five recent cases

Journal flags paper over allegations it used competitors’ text, plasmids

MGGA journal has issued an expression of concern (EOC) for a paper on a common crop virus after the authors were accused of using competitors’ unpublished text and plasmids.

Investigations by the journal and the involved institutions — the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where the paper’s authors are based, and North Carolina State University (presumably, where the accusing group is from) — were inconclusive, the notice states.

So the editor flagged “Sequences enhancing cassava mosaic disease symptoms occur in the cassava genome and are associated with South African cassava mosaic virus infection” with an EOC:

Continue reading Journal flags paper over allegations it used competitors’ text, plasmids

Dental paper pulled for “wrong content with serious consequences”

Clinical Oral InvestigationsAn article on how missing teeth affect chewing was — well, pulled — when someone noticed a few errors. The journal later published a corrected version.

The retraction for “Chewing ability in an adult Chinese population” appeared in Clinical Oral Investigations in 2012, but we’re sharing it with you now because the notice contains some remarkable language:

This article has been withdrawn due to wrong content with serious consequences such as danger to people’s health.

Last author Nico H.J. Creugers, who works at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, told us: 

Continue reading Dental paper pulled for “wrong content with serious consequences”

Fake email for corresponding author forces neuro journal to retract paper

Cellular and Molecular NeurobiologyA chair of a neurobiology department in China has requested the retraction of a paper on which he was unwittingly listed as the lead and corresponding author.

How could a corresponding author — you know, the person with whom the journal corresponds about the paper — be added without their consent? It seems that a fraudulent email account was involved in this case. The address listed for Cheng He, a researcher at the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, didn’t belong to him, said a spokesperson for Springer.

According to the retraction notice for “Identification of the Interaction Between the Human Homologue of the Arabidopsis COP9 Signalosome Subunit 7a and Olig1:”

Continue reading Fake email for corresponding author forces neuro journal to retract paper

Philosopher earns 14th retraction for plagiarism

978-1-4020-3001-7Today, we bring you a case of a serial plagiarizer.

Martin W. F. Stone was a philosophy professor at the University of Leuven — by one account “widely admired and highly respected” — until 2010, when an investigation at the school concluded that his work is “highly questionable in terms of scientific integrity.” Over the past several years, he has racked up retractions, earning his 14th this spring, and spot #30 on our leaderboard.

Stone’s retractions were brought to our attention by philosopher Michael Dougherty, who found a notice for “Michael Baius (1513–89) and the Debate on ‘Pure Nature’: Grace and Moral Agency in Sixteenth-Century Scholasticism,” a chapter in Springer’s Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity.

The retraction notice says that the chapter Continue reading Philosopher earns 14th retraction for plagiarism