The authors of a paper retracted for plagiarism of a popular website have decided not to take the charges — which they don’t contest — lying down.
Here’s the notice for “Alcohol consumption and hormonal alterations related to muscle hypertrophy: a review,” which appeared in Nutrition & Metabolism, a BioMed Central title: Continue reading Author of alcohol paper retracted for plagiarism defends copy-and-paste strategy
Although it shocks some observers every time, we’ve reported on the retractions of more than 100 papers pulled because authors managed to do their own peer review.
Apparently, it’s happened again.
Here’s a retraction notice in BMC Systems Biology for “Predicting new molecular targets for rhein using network pharmacology,” by Aihua Zhang, Hui Sun, Bo Yang and Xijun Wang:
Continue reading It’s happened again: Researcher appears to have peer reviewed his own paper
An article purporting to find that black children are at substantially increased risk for autism after early exposure to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine has been shelved.
Although we don’t know if the events are related, the move comes amid claims that a CDC whistleblower has accused health officials of suppressing information about the link.
Not surprisingly, the prospect that the CDC has been sitting on evidence of an autism-vaccine connection for more than a decade has inflamed the community of activists wrongly convinced that such a link exists.
The paper, “Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data,” was written by Brian Hooker, an engineer-turned-biologist and an active member of that community. It was submitted in April, accepted on August 5, and published on August 8.
Translational Neurodegeneration, which published the article earlier this month, has now removed it and posted the following notice: Continue reading Journal takes down autism-vaccine paper pending investigation
The authors of a paper on anesthetic waste gases in the operating room have pulled the article for plagiarism.
The paper, titled “Further Pieces of Evidence to the Pulmonary Origin of Sevoflurane Escaping to the Operating Room During General Anaesthesia,” appeared in Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics and came from a group at various institutions in Harbin, China.
But according to the retraction notice, the further pieces weren’t really further, after all:
Continue reading Wasted breath: Cribbing earns retraction of anesthesia paper
A diabetes paper that received quite a bit of media attention when it was published in June 2013 was retracted and reissued to fix data errors shortly after publication.
The paper, which showed a steep decline in mortality rates for diabetics in Ontario, Canada, and the UK between 1996 and 2009, was republished in December 2013, with the same conclusion and the errors corrected.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Mortality trends in patients with and without diabetes in Ontario, Canada and the UK from 1996 to 2009: a population-based study”: Continue reading Diabetes researchers retract, correct and republish study on mortality rates
Tardigrades, the most hardy animals on or off planet Earth, can survive boiling, freezing, and even the ravages of outer space.
Unfortunately, some data on water bears’ memories proved to be less long-lasting, earning a retraction for a George Mason University researcher who also published the paper without alerting her co-workers ahead of time.
Here’s the notice for “Suspended animation: effects on short-term and long-term positive associative memory in Hypsibius dujardini,” which first appeared in Invertebrate Neuroscience: Continue reading Bearly believable: Water bear paper retracted for missing lab notebooks
It’s always amusing to see how far a journal will bend over backward to avoid coming out and calling something “plagiarism.”
We’ve got two notices for you that exemplify the phenomenon, which we discussed in our Lab Times column last year.
The first, an article about apartheid, was presented at a student conference and published in the Polyvocia: The SOAS Journal of Graduate Research. It was later retracted because the author “should have used quotation marks around material written verbatim from that source.”
Here’s the notice: Continue reading Mistaken punctuation, misreferencing, and other euphemisms for plagiarism
After typing up 96 citations, researchers from the National Institute for Digestive Diseases, I.R.C.C.S. “S. de Bellis,” in Bari, Italy, apparently ran out of steam for the last five, earning themselves a retraction for plagiarism in a literature review of the effects of probiotics on intestinal cancer.
Here’s the notice for “Intestinal Microbiota, Probiotics and Human Gastrointestinal Cancers,” from the Journal of Gastrointestinal Cancer: Continue reading Yogurt to be kidding me: Five articles plagiarized in one retracted paper
A scientific publishing gadfly who was banned earlier this year from an Elsevier journal for “personal attacks and threats” has had a paper rejected by a Springer journal after he called for the editor’s resignation because of alleged incompetence.
As detailed in a comment left at Retraction Watch, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva submitted a manuscript titled “One Conjunction, a World of Ethical Difference: How Elsevier, the ICMJE and Neurology Define Authorship” to Science and Engineering Ethics on November 11, 2012. As of last week, despite a number of messages sent to editors of the journal, he had not had a decision on the manuscript.
As a result, on July 14 of this year, Teixeira da Silva sent this letter to journal editor Raymond Spier and to Stephanie Bird, an editorial board member assigned to the manuscript: Continue reading Publishing gadfly demands journal editor’s resignation, then has “fairly incomprehensible” paper rejected
In our coverage Tuesday of the republication of the controversial retracted study of GMOs and rats by Gilles Seralini and colleagues, we wrote this about a strange passage in an editor’s note on the paper:
The republished study was peer-reviewed, according to the press materials, and Seralini confirmed that it was in an email to Retraction Watch. But we were curious what “any kind of appraisal of the paper’s content should not be connoted” meant. We asked Seralini and the editor of Environmental Sciences Europe, Henner Hollert, but neither responded.
Hollert has responded to the same question from Nature, which reports: Continue reading Republished Seralini GMO-rat study was not peer-reviewed, says editor
