A 2002 paper has been retracted by Cancer after some of the authors notified the journal that they hadn’t agreed to submit it — and an investigation found that a number of the patients described had been made up.
A group of pain researchers in Austria has lost their 2014 paper in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology because one of the authors wasn’t, well, one of the authors.
During the study, the authors tested whether intravenous infusions of nonopioid drugs (such as paracetamol, or Tylenol) helped people with chronic back pain who take opioids regularly. They found that people’s pain levels decreased in the days leading up to treatment, when they were receiving a placebo, but not after the actual infusion. The results likely stem from “expectation-related mechanisms,” they wrote. Continue reading Pain paper scratched for authorship issues
A pair of plant experts at Uludag University, in Turkey, has lost a paper on techniques for drying parsley because they evidently left a key contributor off the manuscript.
The article, “Effect of Vacuum, Microwave, and Convective Drying on Selected Parsley Quality,” was published online in June 2011 by the International Journal of Food Properties.
During the study, the authors subjected parsley (Petroselinum crispum Mill.) to the various drying techniques, then measured how much each degraded the sample. Ascorbic acid — a particularly “important indicator of quality,” according to the authors — was lowest after convective drying, and highest after using the microwave. “At the end of the study, microwave drying at 750–850 W ensured the shortest drying time and the best overall quality of parsley; thus, it was chosen as the most appropriate technique for parsley drying.”
An article that ranked University of Missouri-Kansas City number one in an area of business school training is set to receive an expression of concern. The move follows months of questions over the ranking’s legitimacy, following revelations such as a relationship between the authors and both the school and its top ranked researcher in the field.
In 2011, the business world got a bit of a surprise: In the field of innovation management, the study of how entrepreneurs convert good ideas into profit, the number one school – according to an article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management — was UMKC. Not Harvard, not Stanford, not any other institution that normally tops these types of rankings. UMKC’s Henry W. Bloch School of Management was also home to the number one researcher in that field, Michael Song.
A fight over a paper posted on preprint server arXiv.org has divided two mathematicians.
The authors initially posted the paper, which looks at the mathematical properties of spheres, in 2013. And that’s when the trouble started.
Apparently, after submitting the paper to a journal and receiving reviewer feedback, co-authors Fabio Tal at the University of São Paulo and Ferry Kwakkel, who got a PhD at the University of Warwick, began to fight over the content of the paper, causing Kwakkel to post his own version, and Tal to withdraw the previous one. “I believe we are severely at odds now,” Tal told Retraction Watch.
In February 2015, Kwakkel, posted a second paper on arXiv.org that he said is his “version” of the 2013 paper, with which it has “substantial text overlap.” Tal requested that the first paper be withdrawn; the note that now appears on “Homogeneous transformation groups of the sphere” cites an “irreconcilable difference of opinion”:
Swiss researchers have retracted an abstract in Clinical Neurophysiology because only one of them actually knew about the paper — and what he submitted had “several mistakes.”
The abstract, about electric impulses in the brain of comatose patients, originally appeared as a poster at the June 2014 joint meeting of multiple Swiss neuroscience societies. It was submitted by first author Alexandre Simonin, who lists his affiliation as the University Hospital of Lausanne, a Swiss hospital.
The meeting proceedings ran in the October issue of Clinical Neurophysiology. Besides the issues of authorship and errors, the notice also says the abstract “potentially conflicts with another publication,” suggesting the data might have already appeared in a paper.
A protein which is sold online as a cure for everything from autism to cancer and the focus of multiple retracted papers has earned more black marks: The UK government’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency has issued a warning about its use after discovering problems in the factory, and a journal has removed the last author from a paper touting its benefits in HIV.
WWII poster for Ravenna Ordnance Plant, via Wikipedia
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.
A PhD candidate in the law school of University of Malaya in Malaysia retracted a paper from a journal on Islamic law in governments, because he failed to add his deceased advisor as an author.
The paper, which calls government secularism in Bangladesh “shadow rather than substance,” was published in Jurnal Syariah, which translates to Shariah Journal. It is quite critical of the idea that the country’s Constitution can name Islam as the state religion while also claiming that it cannot grant political status to any religion.
A group of Chinese cardiologists at Capital Medical University have done a quick ewe-turn, pulling a paper after mixing up both the author order and wrongly reporting how many sheep were killed in the making of this experiment.
We covered another retraction from the CMU cardiology department in September. The sheep paper was published in October.
A 2002 paper has been retracted by Cancer after some of the authors notified the journal that they hadn’t agreed to submit it — and an investigation found that a number of the patients described had been made up.
