Sorry, fans of papers by Maggie Simpson and I. P. Freely, your days of chortling may be coming to an end.
Springer, responding to a case last year in which it and IEEE had to eventually retract more than 120 papers created by SCIgen, is making software that detects such manuscripts freely available.
From a Springer press release: Continue reading An end to fake papers? New software to check for SCIgen-created manuscripts
Springer has put a cell biology journal on hold, “effective immediately,” after finding a “pattern of inappropriate and compromised peer review.”
Here’s the brief statement from the publisher: Continue reading Updated: Springer journal on hold for “pattern of inappropriate and compromised peer review”
An environmental journal has retracted a paper about pollution in China after it discovered the authors lifted the dataset from another group.
The authors of the study — which chronicled the degree of heavy metal pollution on the banks of the Pearl River Delta — didn’t have permission to use the data. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment‘s notice doesn’t suggest the data are inaccurate.
The heavy metals in the soil come from the many manufacturing plants in the area, including those that provide the West with blue jeans, phones, and other electronics. The pollutants’ effects are wide-reaching: According to the South China Morning Post, industrial outfits discharge huge volumes of toxic chemicals into the Pearl River, including arsenic, copper, cadmium, and mercury.
Continue reading Chinese heavy metal contamination paper purged for data theft
A pair of psychology researchers at West Virginia University have lost their 2013 article in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine after one of the authors was found to have cooked the data.
The paper, “Preference for immediate reinforcement over delayed reinforcement: relation between delay discounting and health behavior,” was written by Shane Melanko and Kevin Larkin. It examined whether people who place less importance on the future were also less likely to adopt healthy behaviors, which come with delayed benefits. Melanko, then a doctoral candidate under Larkin, was evidently at one time a psychology student of some promise.
That promise might go unfulfilled. According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Misconduct forces retraction of health behavior paper
An environmental journal has retracted a paper on a technology that helps degrade explosives released into soil, because the first author never got the permission of his “co-authors” — oh, and used data that were “illegally obtained,” according to one of the slighted co-authors.
According to the EPA, more than 30 sites around the country are contaminated by decommissioned explosives, including weapons plants and army depots. A major source of the pollution was workers washing out old bombs into “evaporation lagoons” and then burning the resulting sludge.
The site used for the retracted paper was Ravenna Army Ammunition Plant, a decommissioned weapons factory that stored explosive waste in unlined landfills. According to the EPA, “open burning was also a common practice.”
The problems with the paper in Water, Air & Soil Pollution were uncovered after the head of the company, University of Georgia (UGA) professor Valentine Nzengung, found the paper on ResearchGate. He discovered that first author Chunhui Luo had used (now out-of-date) data without permission, and added Nzengung’s name to the paper without his knowledge. The other author is another UGA professor, Walter O’Niell, who told us he was also not informed about the paper.
Nzengung gave us further details via email: Continue reading Forged author list blows up explosives contamination paper
A paper on the biological insecticide Cry protein — most famously produced by genetically modified “Bt” corn — has been retracted because the authors couldn’t reproduce the findings.
The initial paper concluded that their modified gene produced a Cry protein that was significantly more toxic than the one currently spliced into food crops to make them resistant to moths, beetles, and other insects. However, when repeating the experiments, the modified proteins weren’t any more deadly than the original version.
Here is the notice: Continue reading Cry me a retraction: Scientists pull Cry protein paper for irreproducibility
Accusations of plagiarism spanning at least 14 years have finally caught up with Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who has had 13 papers retracted from a journal he had guest edited.
The dean of the for-profit University of Atlanta has been accused of copying his own and others’ work a number of times, as we wrote in November.
Here’s the notice from Neohelicon editor Péter Hajdu: Continue reading Serial plagiarist loses 13 papers
Plagiarism earned genomics researchers an erratum, not a retraction, in BioMed Central journal BioData Mining.
We keep a list of best euphemisms for plagiarism, and this one is right up there.
Here’s the notice for “An iteration normalization and test method for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data”: Continue reading New favorite plagiarism euphemism: “Inadvertently copied text”
In April 2014, we wrote about the case of a former hydrologist at the University of Kansas (KU), Marios Sophocleous, who had plagiarized in at least seven studies, two of which were retracted by the journal Ground Water.
At the time, we mentioned two other articles, in the Hydrogeology Journal, that appeared destined for retraction — not least because KU requested that the journal yank them. But in a rather surprising move, the journal is declining to do so, and another publication, the Journal of Hydrology, is taking the same approach.
Here’s the notice from Hydrogeology Journal editor Clifford Voss: Continue reading Water under the bridge? Hydrology journals won’t retract plagiarized papers despite university request
Faked peer reviews — a subject about which we’ve been writing more and more recently — are concerning enough to a number of publishers that they’ve approached the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to work together on a solution.
In the past, we have reported on a number of cases in which authors were able to submit their own peer reviews, using fake email addresses for recommended reviewers. But what seems to be happening now is that companies are offering manuscript preparation services that go as far as submitting fake peer reviews. And that, no surprise, worries publishers.
Here’s COPE’s statement out today: Continue reading Are companies selling fake peer reviews to help papers get published?
