Here’s a suggestion: If you’re going to plagiarize someone else’s work, don’t draw attention to it by including “fiction” in your title.
That lesson was brought home to us by a recent retraction in the Italian Journal of Pediatrics for “Infantile colic, facts and fiction:”
Continue reading Pro tip: Don’t use “facts and fiction” in your title if you plan to plagiarize
We’ve reported on some pretty impressive cases of researchers doing their own peer review, one of which led to 28 retractions. We have another.
Yongdeng Lei, of the School of Geography and Remote Sensing Science at Beijing Normal University, pulled the wool over the eyes of two Springer journals. Here’s the notice from Environmental Management for “Typhoon Disasters and Adaptive Governance in Guangdong, China:” Continue reading Want to make sure your paper gets published? Just do your own peer review like this researcher did
A group of authors in Korea has lost their 2013 paper on treating vision loss after one of the two cases they’d reported turned out to have been fatally flawed.
The paper, “Isolated central retinal artery occlusion as an initial presentation of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria and successful long-term prevention of systemic thrombosis with eculizumab,” had appeared in the Japanese Journal of Ophthalmology.
According to the abstract: Continue reading “Critical data” errors force retraction of vision paper
We have an update on the story of 120 bogus papers being removed by IEEE and Springer. The latter posted a statement earlier today, which we include in its entirety below: Continue reading “Unfortunately, scientific publishing is not immune to fraud and mistakes”: Springer responds to fake papers story
A group of bird researchers in Korea has lost their 2006 paper on DNA barcoding of that country’s avian species because they feathered the article with material from others.
The paper, “DNA barcoding Korean birds,” appeared in Molecules and Cells, published by Springer for the Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology and has been cited 88 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. According to the abstract: Continue reading Clone call for bird gene bar-coding paper
A 2013 article in Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Journal of Microbiology has been retracted for a few reasons.
Here’s the notice for “The effects of each beta-glucosidase gene deletion on cellulase gene regulation in Neurospora crassa:” Continue reading “Inconsistent errors” and unknowing authors force retraction of microbiology paper
Two major publishers will remove more than 120 papers created with random paper generator SCIgen, according to Nature.
Richard van Noorden, who has the scoop, reports:
Continue reading Springer, IEEE withdrawing more than 120 nonsense papers
AAPS PharmSciTech, a journal of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, has retracted a 2013 paper by a group from India. The reason appears to be manipulated data, although the wording of the notice leaves that open to interpretation.
The article, “Design and Formulation Technique of a Novel Drug Delivery System for Azithromycin and Its Anti-Bacterial Activity Against Staphylococcus aureus,” was written by a trio of researchers at the Center for Nanobiotechnology at VIT University in Vellore.
The article, published online in June, purported to find that: Continue reading Pharmaceutical journal retracts antibiotics paper with dodgy data, with an unclear notice
Nutrition & Metabolism has retracted a 2008 article by a dwindling group of researchers from Pakistan. We’d say it’s the equivalent of punting on first down, expect that’s what the editors probably should have done in the beginning.
As it happens, the journal seems to be guilty of delay of game in this case. As this blog post by Jeffrey Beall notes, allegations that the now-retracted paper was a verbatim copy of another article arose in 2010.
The abstract of the article, which is still available, reads: Continue reading And then there were none: Plagiarism forces retraction of metabolism paper with vanishing authors
In December, we reported on the case of Dong-Pyou Han, who was found by the Office of Research Integrity to have spiked rabbit blood samples to make it look as though a vaccine for HIV was working.
At the time, Han’s former institution, Iowa State, told us that “one oral presentation and some abstracts will be removed from the web.”
One of those retractions has occurred, in Retrovirology, of “Eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 that target gp41 MPER.” Here’s the notice: Continue reading Faked HIV vaccine research presentation retracted