The head of a Japanese university has been found guilty of research misconduct for self-plagiarism – technically, duplication – and has agreed to pay a one-time cash penalty for his transgressions.
According to the University of Aizu, a computer science and engineering school in Aizuwakamatsu, Toshiaki Miyazaki, the president and CEO, failed to appropriately cite his own work in four papers:
Continue reading University president in Japan self-plagiarized and will forfeit some pay
Researchers in the United States and Singapore have lost a 2016 article in Science Advances after some of the group learned that one of their colleagues appears to have used duplicated images in the work.
The article, “A universal cooperative assembly-directed method for coating of mesoporous TiO2 nanoshells with enhanced lithium storage properties,” was written by Bu Yuan Guan, then of the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, along with colleagues at that institution and Ju Li, of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The paper has been cited 167 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Nanotech paper retracted for duplicated images
An Elsevier journal has corrected a retraction notice after we asked questions about what exactly it was saying — but not before the journal’s editor tried to defend what turned out to be a mistaken passage.
The article, “Measurement of performance parameters and improvement in optimized solution of WEDM on a novel titanium hybrid composite,” was published online in Measurement in December 2020. The retraction notice, which appeared online on September 17 of this year, read:
Continue reading Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch
Possession is nine-tenths of the law — at least, it seems, for one journal editor, who is refusing to retract a study despite learning that one of its images previously appeared in another journal. The reason? The other study has been removed from the web.
The paper is among 40 articles in Construction and Building Materials flagged by a whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. The whistleblower says that most of the issues are serious, and are:
Continue reading Editor declines to correct paper with duplicated image after earlier study disappears
A pharmacy researcher at Tehran University of Medical Sciences has had three papers retracted, and one corrected, because he duplicated his other articles.
Hamid Akbari Javar is the common author on all four papers, which appear in the African Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research, the Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the International Journal of Molecular Medicine.
Narges Shokri, of the School of Pharmacy of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences, also in Iran, is an author of the three retracted papers, but not the corrected paper in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine.
Here’s the notice for “Comparison of Calcium Phosphate and Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles as Dermal Penetration Enhancers for Albumin,” in the Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences:
Continue reading Researcher at Tehran medical school loses three papers because “overlap without cross-referencing is not legitimated”
The authors of a 2017 paper on resistance to cancer chemotherapy have retracted and replaced the article after learning that it included duplicated material from previously published work by one of the duo.
The article, “The evolution and ecology of resistance in cancer therapy,” was written by Robert Gatenby and Joel Brown, of the Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa, Fla. It appeared in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine.
Richard Sever, the editor of the journal, told us that sometime after publication, a reader alerted his office that the paper included passages of text that were identical to those in a 2015 paper in Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), by Gatenby and two other co-authors:
Continue reading Author blames “multitasking dementia” for duplicated cancer paper
Here’s a retraction notice after our own hearts.
Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters.
The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China.
According to the notice:
Continue reading Why duplicate publications matter: A retraction notice goes above and beyond
If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine.
The journal, a Taylor & Francis title, in April published “Mental health burden for the public affected by the COVID-19 outbreak in China: Who will be the high-risk group?,” by a pair of authors in China. The researchers submitted their manuscript on March 19, received acceptance on April 6 and saw the work published on April 14.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.
In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication.
Continue reading Researchers publish the same COVID-19 paper three times
A trio of speech researchers in India has lost a 2020 paper for a trifecta of malpractice: plagiarism, self-plagiarism (of a previously retracted article, no less!) and falsification of data.
The article, “Speech enhancement method using deep learning approach for hearing-impaired listeners,” appeared in January in Health Informatics Journal, a Sage title.
According to the abstract:
Continue reading Here’s why you shouldn’t try to republish a paper you had retracted for plagiarism
A study that compared drugs used to reverse the effects of relaxants for surgery has been retracted because the majority of the results were already published.
The study, “Comparison of sugammadex and pyridostigmine bromide for reversal of rocuronium-induced neuromuscular blockade in short-term pediatric surgery,” appeared in the journal Medicine in February 2020.
The work found that the drug sugammadex worked faster than pyridostigmine in children undergoing surgery, and doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. But a study with the same authors and same name (barring a single uncapitalized letter) had already been published in the journal Anesthesia and Pain Medicine on July 31, 2019.
Continue reading Painfully awkward: Duplicate anesthesiology study retracted