springer retractions – Page 4

Four dead authors, a duplicate publication and questions: Solve this one!

A study spanning dozens of years, four deceased authors and a retraction for duplicate publication. Sounds like a recipe for an episode of that new show about medical detectives (not epidemiologists; detectives with guns).

We’d like to be able to explain, but, well, we can’t. What we do know is that the authors of a 2019 article about the role of aluminum in neurologic disease have retracted their paper because it’s a duplicate of an article some of them had published in 2018. But that’s as clear as things get.

Here’s the retraction notice, which, like any good mystery, is full of question marks:

“I cannot agree to this unfounded, unscientific, and rather Kafkian retraction.”

Mladen Pavicic, of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and the Ruder Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, Croatia has had a paper retracted from Nanoscale Research Letters.

He’s not happy about it.

In a preprint posted to arXiv, “Response to “Retraction Note: Can Two-Way Direct Communication Protocols Be Considered Secure,” Pavicic writes:

Pass the salt…off as your own? Plagiarism, meet salinity.

A group of physicists in Morocco have lost a 2018 paper over plagiarism and other concerns.

The article, “A 2D fluid motion model of the estuarine water circulation: Physical analysis of the salinity stratification in the Sebou estuary,” appeared in European Physics Journal Plus. The first author, Soufiane Haddout, is listed as being at Ibn Tofail University in Kenitra.

According to the notice:

“Highly unusual and unfortunate error” delays retraction two years in high-profile Duke case

As we’ve noted before, “the wheels of scientific publishing turn slowly … but they do (sometimes) turn.”

More than six years after the first retraction for Erin Potts-Kant, who was part of a group at Duke whose work would unravel amid misconduct allegations and lead to a $112.5 million settlement earlier this year with the U.S. government — and two years after a journal says it first became aware of the issues — a retraction by the group has appeared in Pediatric Research, a Springer Nature title.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Intra-amniotic LPS amplifies hyperoxia-induced airway hyperreactivity in neonatal rats”:

Springer Nature took eleven months to retract a plagiarized book, then made it disappear without a trace

A year ago today, Jennifer Powers, a co-author of a 2009 paper wrote to Springer Nature to alert the publisher to the fact that Tropical Dry Deciduous Forest: Research Trends and Emerging Features, a 2017 textbook by J. S. Singh and R.K. Chaturvedi, had plagiarized her work, and the work of others. A publisher representative responded six days later, saying they would look into the matter.

Then, for five months, crickets.

On January 23 of this year, Powers, of the University of Minnesota, sent another message asking for a progress report. Several days later, a Springer Nature staffer wrote to say they would provide an answer by mid-February.

Mid-February came and went, and the co-author sent another reminder, as did Jesse Lasky, of Penn State, another of the authors who said his work had been plagiarized. Back from Springer came this message:

Journal retracts creationist paper “because it was published in error”

It’s become a sort of Retraction Watch Mad Libs: Author writes a paper that is so far, far, out of the mainstream. Maybe it argues that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Or that vaccines cause autism. Truth squads swarm over the paper, taking to blogs and Twitter to wonder, in the exasperated tone of those who have been here before, how on earth it was published in a peer reviewed journal.

Then, in something that approaches — but does not quite qualify as — contrition, the journal in question retracts the paper, mumbling something in a retraction notice about a compromised peer review process, or that ghosts in the machine allowed the paper to be published instead of being rejected.

This week’s parade float entry is a paper in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, a Springer Nature title that is apparently sponsored by The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where many of its editorial board members work.

Here’s how Jerry Coyne, a researcher at the University of Chicago who keeps an eye on creationists, described the paper, “A brief history of human evolution: challenging Darwin’s claim,” written by Sarah Umer, in a December 18, 2018 post: Continue reading Journal retracts creationist paper “because it was published in error”

Irony? The Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention retracts a paper

Irony machine, start your engine: A pair of engineers have lost a 2017 paper in the Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention over a failure to determine who owned the data.

The article, “Solder selection for reflowing large ceramic substrates during PCB assembly,” was written by Prashant Reddy Gangidi and Noy Souriyasak, both listed as working at a semiconductor firm called FormFactor Inc., based in Livermore, Calif.

Evidently, at least one of the authors lacked the okay to publish the data.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Irony? The Journal of Failure Analysis and Prevention retracts a paper

One retraction notice says plagiarism. The other says it was an error in an algorithm. Which was it?

For the second time in a week, we’ve come across a retraction notice that gave the wrong reason for the retraction.

Last week, it was an Elsevier journal that called a plagiarized paper a duplicate of work by the same authors who’d written the original. Today, here’s the story of a chapter in a book published by Springer Nature that manages to list two different reasons for retraction.

According to one notice for “In-silico Analysis of LncRNA-mRNA Target Prediction” in: D. Reddy Edla et al. (eds.), Advances in Machine Learning and Data Science, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 705, the chapter was retracted for plagiarism.

But according to the other notice, the retraction happened because Continue reading One retraction notice says plagiarism. The other says it was an error in an algorithm. Which was it?

Distraction paper pulled for clerical error

The authors of a 2018 paper on how noisy distractions disrupt memory are retracting the article after finding a flaw in their study.

The paper, “Unexpected events disrupt visuomotor working memory and increase guessing,” appeared in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, a publication of the Psychonomic Society. (For those keeping score at home, psychonomics is the study of the laws of the mind.)

The article purported to show that an unexpected “auditory event,” like the sudden blare of a car horn, reduced the ability of people to remember visuomotor cues. Per the abstract:

Continue reading Distraction paper pulled for clerical error

A journal waited 13 months to reject a submission. Days later, it published a plagiarized version by different authors

When a researcher submitted a manuscript to a journal about multimedia tools, she was frustrated to wait 13 months for the journal to make a decision — only to have it reject the paper outright. So imagine how she felt when, days after the paper was rejected, she saw the journal had published a plagiarized version of the paper by a group of different authors.

Clearly, something went very awry here — especially since the journal, Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), has retracted three papers by the same group of authors, all of which plagiarized from unpublished manuscripts by other people.

Of course, one possibility is that an author was a peer reviewer of the manuscripts, and stole the unpublished material — something that unfortunately does happen.

There are four authors in common to all three manuscripts, but only one — corresponding author Chao Xiong of the Changzhou Institute of Technology in China — has responded to any queries from MTAP, according to the retraction notices. As the notices state, Xiong agrees with one of the the retractions, but not the other two. (All of the papers cover similar topics and were submitted around the same time, so it’s unclear why Xiong didn’t object to one retraction.)

Here’s a sample notice, for “Image-based reversible data hiding algorithm toward big multimedia data:”

Continue reading A journal waited 13 months to reject a submission. Days later, it published a plagiarized version by different authors

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