Almost two years ago, we brought you — with the help of Trevor Stokes — the story of a stem cell researcher in Korea whose publication record, and career, unraveled after evidence of image manipulation surfaced in her work.
Here’s a physics question: How is it possible to be in two places at the same time?
Answer: Submit the same manuscript twice and hope the editors forget to feed Schrödinger’s cat.
The journal Condensed Matter Physics is retracting a 2013 paper by a Ukrainian scientist who’d published essentially the same paper seven years earlier.The article was titled “On the origin of power-law distributions in systems with constrained phase space,” and was written by an E.V. Vakarin, of the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, in Lviv UMR 7575 LECA ENSCP-UPMC-CNRS.
Developmental Biology has retracted a 2009 paper by an group of regenerative medicine specialists who, it seems, were regenerating more than just cells.
The article, titled “The human placenta is a hematopoietic organ during the embryonic and fetal periods of development,” was led by Susan Fisher, of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. It has been cited 32 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
In a case whose irony is not lost on those involved, an article about publishing ethics has been retracted because one of the authors re-used material he’d written for an earlier piece. But the authors and the journal’s editors have turned the episode into a learning opportunity.
Rick Reilly, a noted sports columnist, once wrote about football replays:
Tell me if I’m a crank, but do you notice that every time a football replay comes up—and I mean every time—the color guy goes, “OK, now watch this!” I mean, what else are we gonna do? Suddenly start knitting a sweater? Start collecting for UNICEF? You don’t need to tell us to watch the TV set we’re already watching! OK, maybe I am a crank.
But readers of Reilly might well have wondered why they were being subjected to replays of his work. His bosses at ESPN.com evidently did, because they’ve unplugged the writer’s keyboard in the wake of a self-plagiarism scandal, according to news reports. Such self-plagiarism — more accurately referred to as duplication — is of course a frequent reason for retractions.
A common theme in movies involving time travel is that if you meet yourself in the past, you’ll upset the time-space continuum, and cause all sorts of problems. Well, a group of materials scientists in Hong Kong seems to have invented a time machine, and learned that if if you publish a paper that appears to have been published in the future, you’ll suffer a retraction (and correction) for duplicating your own data.
We’ll (try to) explain.
The group in 1997 published a paper in Composite Interfaces titled “Reliability of fiber Bragg grating sensors embedded in textile composites.”
The editors of the journal Micron — an Elsevier title — have retracted its first paper ever, and in an editorial marking the occasion, take on a number of issues in scientific publishing misconduct.
A pair of mathematicians from Egypt has lost their 2012 article in the Journal of the Egyptian Mathematical Society because they reused some of the material from a previous publication.
A pair of researchers at the University of Maryland have retracted a paper in Cell Death & Differentiation after it became clear that one of the figures had been duplicated from an earlier paper.
The Journal of Asian Earth Sciences has retracted a 2004 article by a scholar in India who resused text from a previous work on which he was a co-author.
Almost two years ago, we brought you — with the help of Trevor Stokes — the story of a stem cell researcher in Korea whose publication record, and career, unraveled after evidence of image manipulation surfaced in her work.
