What’s that sucking sound you hear from the journal Vacuum? Why, a retraction, of course.
The journal is pulling a 2012 paper by a group of researchers from India who stole images and used them in misleading ways — that’s data fabrication, kids.
Here’s the retraction notice for the article, titled “Microwave synthesis, characterization and humidity sensing properties of single crystalline Zn2SnO4 nanorods”:
Continue reading Vacuum retracts paper on nanorods for plagiarism, image manipulation
Note (4/9/13): John McArthur contacted us with a few corrections, which we have made below.
The Journal of Contaminant Hydrology has retracted a 2008 paper by a group of Indian scientists for plagiarism and the failure to adequately reference their sources.
What makes this case somewhat unusual is that the journal allowed the authors to issue a correction (of the mega variety) attempting to acknowledge the problems, but then evidently decided that the patient was too sick to live — and that part of the disease was iatrogenic.
Here’s the retraction notice for the article, titled “Hydrogeochemical behavior of arsenic-enriched groundwater in the deltaic environment: Comparison between two study sites in West Bengal, India”:
Continue reading Arsenic-in-the-water paper with “interesting data” first corrected, now retracted
Colin Purrington has developed something of a niche in the research world. While teaching evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College, Purrington began developing a how-to manual for putting together poster presentations for meetings — a pursuit that has earned him a little money and some attention.
The result is a website, Designing conference posters, that, by his reckoning, has received some 2 million hits over the years (actually, there was a previous iteration of the site called “Advice on designing scientific posters”).
Not surprisingly, Purrington, who has copyrighted the material on his site, likes to protect his intellectual property. According to Purrington‘s site:
Continue reading Plagiarism spat over scientific poster prep advice escalates to legal threats
A pair of engineers at Hohai University in Nanjing, China, has lost their 2012 paper in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. The reason: The article, “Study of the New Leon model for concrete failure,” wasn’t theirs to publish.
According to the retraction notice (which is dated September 2013 but has already appeared in ScienceDirect): Continue reading Retraction for water researchers who ripped off dissertation
Earlier this month, we brought you the story of a paper in a journal about business ethics being retracted for — wait for it — plagiarism. The paper that seemed to be the one in question — see the post for why that was a bit unclear — was by Benjamin A. Neil, a professor at Towson University in Maryland.
Today, the Baltimore Sun reports that Neil is under investigation by Towson for more alleged plagiarism, and has “resigned his post as the head of the city school system’s ethics panel.” From the Sun: Continue reading Is defining plagiarism “like catching smoke in a butterfly net?” Towson professor under investigation
Joseph Hoffman, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Bielefeld in Germany says he got a “kind of odd” feeling as he read a recent paper on the transcriptome of the spotted seal. Let’s just call it deja vu.
The article, “Characterization of the spotted seal Phoca largha transcriptome using Illumina paired-end sequencing and development of SSR markers,” which appeared in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part D: Genomics and Proteomics:
Continue reading Seals of disapproval, as pinniped paper gets yanked for plagiarism
The Surgeon has retracted a 2012 article by a group from the U.K. who took text from a previously published article. So, you say? Nu?
Well, we found — through relatively little effort — that the plagiarizees were themselves, shall we say, liberal in their use of material from other sources.
The retracted article was titled “Bone graft substitutes: What are the options?,” and it appeared in August 2012. One of the options, we guess, was to steal text.
According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Post 982 — in which we find plagiarized bone graft paper that grafted from other papers
In a new retraction notice, the Journal of Controlled Release is living up to its name.
The editor-in-chief has retracted a study that plagiarized “a large number” of papers, but only three are listed in the notice. Here’s the notice for “In situ-forming hydrogels for sustained ophthalmic drug delivery,” by Basavaraj K. Nanjawade, F.V. Manvi, and A.S. Manjappa, three researchers at India’s KLES’s College of Pharmacy, JN Medical College Campus, Karnataka: Continue reading Study plagiarizes so many other papers, retraction notice can’t list them all
Is this the new business ethics?
In January, we reported on a paper retracted from the Journal of Business Ethics for duplication. That earned the author a five-year publishing ban. This week, we learned of a case of plagiarism in another journal in the field, the Journal of Academic and Business Ethics. Here’s an email editor Russell Baker — no, not that Russell Baker — sent to his contact list on Wednesday: Continue reading Oh, the irony: Business ethics journal paper retracted for plagiarism
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the work of Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist who has taken a tough stance about many of the problems in his field and coordinates the Reproducibility Project. So it must have seemed quite ironic for Nosek and his co-authors to learn today that one of their papers had been outrageously — and badly — plagiarized.
Here’s the abstract of the work by Nosek, Jesse Graham, and others, which hasn’t been published in a journal yet but is posted at Nosek’s website: Continue reading “What I find offensive is not that they plagiarized us, it’s that they did it so badly”