Sometimes, the full story of scientific misdeeds isn’t clear until several retraction notices appear. Take the case of a group of Vietnamese astrophysicists led by Thong Duc Le.
The June 2012 issue of Current Opinion in Critical Care has a retraction that might have been a rather mundane case of plagiarism but for the remarkably intertwined relationships of the authors of the publications involved.
The authors of three papers in Rheumatology International about systemic sclerosis, also known as scleroderma, are retracting them after patients were misidentified in databases. According to the three notices:
This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. The authors made a serious statistical error which unfortunately invalidates their results.
Corresponding author Metin Isik tells Retraction Watch that the error was adding a patient with systemic sclerosis database twice, and adding another patient with polymyositis, not systemic sclerosis, to the sclerosis database. (Why the journal didn’t spell that out in the notice is anyone’s guess, but we’ve asked the editor for comment and will update with anything we hear back.)
A group of cancer researchers from Tunisia has been seeding the oncology literature with plagiarized articles that steal liberally — both text and data — from the work of others.
Two liver journals have retracted articles from a group of Irani researchers who published similar — but not quite identical — versions of the same paper some months apart.
A while back (last June, to be precise), we wrote about a group of Japanese endocrinologists who found a creative way to up their citation counts using duplicate publication. At the time, the researchers were docked a 2004 paper in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry & Molecular Biology that had self-plagiarized extensively from a 2003 article in Cell.
Well, skeptics of this new math take heart: The group’s publication total has fallen yet again. Turns out that 2003 paper — which has been cited 160 times, up from 144 when we checked last year, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge — wasn’t quite up to snuff, either.
Plagiarism is a frequent reason for retraction. Today, we’re pleased to present a guest post by Marya Zilberberg, a physician health services researcher and faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. In this post, she describes what it’s like to find out one of your papers has been plagiarized — and how to get satisfaction. Well, sort of.
Right or wrong, peer-reviewed publications in my trade are academic currency. They provide name recognition, invitations to review, edit and speak, and in general make you feel like a part of the “in-crowd.” Of course the most important metric that publications feed are the infamous h-index, which measures how “influential” your studies are by the number of citations they engender. So, like any other artificial grade, it makes sense to engage in intermittent care and watering of your h-index, and mine is pretty good for where I am in my career. Little did I realize that there is an even more important impact metric than the h-index: plagiarism.
An ecology researcher in the Congo has found himself at the center of a plagiarism scandal that has felled seven of his papers.
As Science reports today, Serge Valentin Pangou’s work began unraveling in August 2011 after Wageningen University ecologist Patrick Jansen thought a paper he’d been asked to review for the International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation seemed familiar — because he’d written many of the same words in a 2007 paper in Conservation Biology. He ran the manuscript through the plagiarism detection software Turnitin, and sure enough, it was about 90% identical.
The author of a controversial and now-retracted paper questioning the science of climate change has been reprimanded by his university for plagiarism. According to USA Today’s Dan Vergano, who broke the news:
[Edward] Wegman was the senior author of a 2006 report to Congress that criticized climate scientists as excessively collaborative, and found fault with a statistical technique used in two climate studies. Portions of the report analysis were published in the journal, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, in a 2008 study.
University of Massachusetts professor Raymond Bradley filed a complaint against Wegman in 2010, noting that portions of the report and the CSDA study appeared lifted from one of his textbooks and from other sources, including Wikipedia. CSDA later retracted the study, noting the plagiarism, last year.
Sometimes, the full story of scientific misdeeds isn’t clear until several retraction notices appear. Take the case of a group of Vietnamese astrophysicists led by Thong Duc Le.
