A strange tale is brewing at a journal that has been shuttered since August of last year, which will lead to some 40 expressions of concern.
There are a number of threads to tie together here, so bear with us for a moment. First, BioMed Central, the publisher of Head & Neck Oncology, posted this statement on the journal’s homepage today: Continue reading Head-spinning: Publisher to post dozens of notices of concern following investigations into editors in chief
Has anyone seen our irony meter?
The author of a 2003 study on “the ethics of being first” is retracting it because it turns out he had already published it elsewhere — making it, well, not first.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Surgical Research and the Ethics of Being First,” the Journal of Value Inquiry paper: Continue reading Who’s on first? Paper on “the ethics of being first” retracted because it was…second
Sometimes, it’s easiest and most straightforward if we just let retraction notices sink in before we comment on them.
Take this one from Semigroup Forum, signed by Chong-yih Wu of National Pingtung Institute of Commerce, Pingtung, Taiwan: Continue reading No, math prof, Google isn’t a proper literature search (and don’t plagiarize your dead mentor)
A group of researchers in South Africa has lost their 2012 article in BMC Research Notes after one of the author’s institutions evidently pulled rank and sought to claim the data as its own.
The article, “Association of body weight and physical activity with blood pressure in a rural population in the Dikgale village of Limpopo Province in South Africa,” appeared last February. Its first author was Seth Mkhonto, who listed two affiliations, the Human Sciences Research Council, in Pretoria, and the University of the Limpopo.
But the latter institution seems not to have given Mkhonto approval to publish the data — a rather strange state of affairs given the whole “publish or perish” ethos of academia.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Dispute over data rights forces retraction of obesity paper
A group of researchers in India has lost two articles in the plant literature for shenanigans with duplicate submission.
One article, “Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation and efficient regeneration of a timber yielding plant Dalbergia sissoo Roxb,” appeared online last June in the journal. The authors were from institutions in Orissa.
According to the retraction notice, the paper was a case of “thanks, but no thanks.” What’s worse, the researchers seem to be under the impression that they’ve done nothing wrong. Because they said so. Continue reading Plant journals uproot duplicate publications that authors used as a hedge
A pair of researchers in India has lost a paper in Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries for lifting chunks of text from other sources.
The article, “Advancements in morphometric differentiation: a review on stock identification among fish populations,” appeared in last March from scientists at the National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources in Lucknow.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading The one that got away: Plagiarism cuts line on fish stock paper
The Journal of of Inequalities and Applications has retracted a paper for unspecified “ethical problems.”
Here’s the notice for “Strong Limiting Behavior in Binary Search Trees:” Continue reading Math paper retracted because it “contains some ethical problems”
The humble chickpea has become one of the world’s most promising cash crops, so it’s no surprise that efforts are underway to make it even more humble, er, profitable, through genetic manipulation.
But one group of scientists made hummus out of their approach when they botched what evidently was a key element of a figure in their 2011 paper in Plant Cell Reports (PCR).
The article, “High-efficiency Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) and regeneration of insect-resistant transgenic plants,” came from researchers at the National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow, India. Cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, it purported to find that: Continue reading Figure error forces retraction of transgenic chickpea paper
The Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics has retracted a 2010 paper by a group of Iranian researchers after concluding that the authors may have misrepresented both the nature of the study and the originality of the work.
The article, “Can fresh embryo transfers be replaced by cryopreserved-thawed embryo transfers in assisted reproductive cycles? A randomized controlled trial,” came from Abbas Aflatoonian, Homa Oskouian, Shahnaz Ahmadi and Leila Oskouian at Yazd Research & Clinical Center for Infertility at Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Science. According to the abstract: Continue reading Journal retracts IVF paper over data concerns
A group of psychiatric researchers in Norway has lost their 2013 paper in BMC Research Notes on the effects of antipsychotic medications on the brain after discovering that they’d botched their imaging analyses.
The article, “Does changing from a first generation antipsychotic (perphenazin) to a second generation antipsychotic (risperidone) alter brain activation and motor activity? A case report,” came from a trio of scientists at the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital, also in Bergen. According to the abstract of the paper, which was published last May:
Continue reading When 1 equals 2, the result is a retraction