Category: duplication retractions

Four genetics papers retracted for duplication

Petter Portin, of the University of Turku, Finland, has been forced to retract four papers because they were duplicates of work he had already published.

Two of those retractions appear in the February 2011 issue of Hereditas. Here’s one retraction notice (link added):

The following article from Hereditas: Portin, P. ‘The effect of the mus309 mutation, defective in DNA double-strand break repair, on crossing over in Drosophila melanogaster suggests a mechanism for interference’, published online in Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/) on 1 September 2009, Hereditas, volume 146, pp. 162–176, has been retracted by agreement between the author, the Editor-in-Chief, Anssi Saura, and John Wiley & Sons A/S. The retraction has been agreed due to prior publication of a similar article in Genetica.

And the other (link added): Continue reading Four genetics papers retracted for duplication

Another math paper retracted because of duplication

Last month, we brought you news of two retractions in math journals for duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship. Last week, we learned that the lead author of one of those papers, Amir Mahmood, has retracted another paper, this one in Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications.

According to the retraction notice, the paper was an “accidental duplication of an article that has already been published” in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation.

The papers share two authors: Mahmood, of the department of mathematics at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology and the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences of GC University, both in Lahore, Pakistan; and N.A. Khan, of the University of Karachi’s math department. Khan was also on one of the two papers we wrote about last month, but not the one Mahmood co-authored. Those two papers’ shared author was M. Jamil.

Mahmood told Retraction Watch by email that the papers are not duplicates, and that the journal editors could not explain to him why they were.

Retraction Watch readers can be the judge. The abstract of the retracted paper: Continue reading Another math paper retracted because of duplication

Duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship force retractions of two math papers

Two math journals have recently retracted two papers that share most of their text — and their first author.

The two papers were “Unsteady flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid in a cylindrical domain for a given shear stress,” in Applied Mathematics and Computation, and “A note on longitudinal flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid due to a prescribed shear stress,” in Mathematical and Computer Modelling. The studies were published online last year, but hadn’t made it into a print issue yet.

Both retraction notices, which appeared within the space of a few weeks in late February and early March, say the same thing — that is to say, nothing at all, really:

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.

So what was wrong with the original reports? Continue reading Duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship force retractions of two math papers

Physics Letters A paper gets retracted twice, but the issues remain “unsettled”

A retraction with a complex and yet unclear narrative appears in the April 25, 2011 issue of Physics Letters A. According to the notice, for “Nuclear spin magnetic resonance force microscopy using slice modulation:”

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors of Physics Letters A because there are unsettled issues on how the research was carried out, how the data were acquired and analyzed. The article was removed from the journal issue before printing although it appeared online. In addition, the article was accidentally published online twice in the same journal.

As the notice suggests, this was actually the second retraction, of the same paper. Here was the first, in 2008, shortly after the paper was published. And here is a removal notice, from later that year. We haven’t come across such an occurrence before, although we’ve been writing Retraction Watch for less than a year.

There are six editors of Physics Letters A, and we tried them all for comment on the “unsettled issues.” A few pointed to Burkhard Fricke, the communicating editor for the paper, who is no longer with the journal. He didn’t respond to requests for more information.

A few referred us to Karine van Wetering, a publisher at Elsevier: Continue reading Physics Letters A paper gets retracted twice, but the issues remain “unsettled”

Retractions we haven’t had a chance to cover, part 2: Duplication and plagiarism edition

Last week, we started a new series at Retraction Watch, “Retractions we haven’t had a chance to cover.” The first edition had sort of an environmental theme. This one has a duplication and self-plagiarism theme. But it’s not always the authors’ fault, as you’ll learn. Continue reading Retractions we haven’t had a chance to cover, part 2: Duplication and plagiarism edition

Two more retractions for Mori make 16 — but not a record

Biochemical Journal has retracted two articles by Naoki Mori, bringing the total number of pulled papers by the Japanese cancer researcher to sixteen.

As with the previous Mori retractions, the latest ones — of papers published in 2007 and 2010 — involve unreliable images. Mori, you’ll recall, had recycled control blots from study to study over the years, and was dismissed from his academic post in August.

The 2007 paper, “Activation of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 in human T-cell leukaemia virus type 1-infected cell lines and primary adult T-cell leukaemia cells,” also included a frequent co-author Mariko Tomita, who has been implicated in the deception. It has been cited 15 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The 2010 article, “Inhibition of Akt/GSK3β signalling pathway by Legionella pneumophila is involved in induction of T-cell apoptosis,” has not yet been cited.

In each case, the retraction notice is the same: Continue reading Two more retractions for Mori make 16 — but not a record

Why was that paper retracted? Editor to Retraction Watch: “It’s none of your damn business”

L. Henry Edmunds, photo by University of Pennsylvania

Yesterday, we reported on the retraction of a 2004 study in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. As we noted, the notice’s language was, um, fuzzy, referring vaguely to

an investigation by the University of Florida, which uncovered instances of repetitious, tabulated data from previously published studies.

Today, we are slightly more clear, although what we really got was an earful of other language.

We had the pleasure of speaking this morning with L. Henry Edmunds, Jr., the long-time editor of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, who gave us a better sense of why his retraction notice was so delicately worded. Edmunds, responding to question of why the letter didn’t say more about the matter:

It’s none of your damn business.

Ranting against “journalists and bloggists,” Edmunds, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, said the purpose of the retraction notice was merely Continue reading Why was that paper retracted? Editor to Retraction Watch: “It’s none of your damn business”

Irony alert: Shades of plagiarism undo med ethics paper on terminal care

With some conservatives fulminating over President Obama’s eternal lust for “death panels,” we have our own case of end-of-life outrage to report.

BMC Medical Ethics has retracted a November 2010 paper by two authors from Mayo Clinic whose manuscript — “End-of-life discontinuation of destination therapy with cardiac and ventilatory support medical devices: physician-assisted death or allowing the patient to die?” — contained passages that closely echoed those in another article, “Moral fictions and medical ethics,” published online in July 2009 in the journal Bioethics.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Irony alert: Shades of plagiarism undo med ethics paper on terminal care

Microbial reproduction: Plagiarism from Wikipedia, elsewhere leads to retraction of biotech paper

When is an advance not an advance?

Biotechnology Advances has retracted a 2008 review by researchers in India who allegedly stole chunks of their manuscript from several sources including journal articles, Wikipedia, and StateMaster.com, a statistics clearinghouse.

According to the notice, the article, titled “Microbial production of dihydroxyacetone” Continue reading Microbial reproduction: Plagiarism from Wikipedia, elsewhere leads to retraction of biotech paper

Redundancy, redux: Anesthesia journal retracts obesity paper in self-plagiarism case

Sometimes redundancy — the topic of our last post — is a failure of editors to adequately vet a manuscript. Other times, the blame falls more squarely on the authors.

Consider: In the August 2010 issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, a highly regarded specialty journal, five researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by Andrew Ochroch, made a remarkable confession.

Their article in the May issue of A&A on ventilation of patients recovering from bariatric surgery plagiarized a 2009 paper in a competing publication, Anesthesiology — written by the same group:

We sincerely apologize for the inappropriate and unacceptable intellectual overlap and self-plagiarism of our paper … published in Anesthesiology.

Sincere apologies are better, we suppose, than insincere ones. But, never mind. They go on: Continue reading Redundancy, redux: Anesthesia journal retracts obesity paper in self-plagiarism case