The Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) has retracted a November 2011 editorial by a group of French cancer researchers, including David Khayat, the former head of that country’s National Cancer Institute, over what appears to be fairly extensive plagiarism.
Here’s the notice for the article, “Lymphocyte Infiltration in Breast Cancer: A Key Prognostic Factor That Should Not Be Ignored:” Continue reading JCO retracts article from major French cancer group over apparent plagiarism
Today, we have the pleasure of presenting a guest post from Mico Tatalovic, who wrote in October aboutretractions in journals in his home country, Croatia. Here, he describes what appears to be an alarming rate of plagiarism in Serbian journals.
A report for the Serbian science ministry by the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON) found that whopping 11% of scientific journal articles by Serbian authors published in English language but in Serbian journals were plagiarised. The proportion was similar across all sciences (natural, medical, technical and social).
Apart from widespread plagiarism, they also found that 0.35% of the articles in the the Serbian citation index and journal database (SCIndeks) were published twice in identical form, often in the same journal.
Forgetful editors who still track manuscripts ‘manually’ may forget to mark them as ‘published’, which can result in duplicates in the same journal, according to Pero Sipka, director of CEON.
Interestingly, editors and publishers were less likely to deem a paper plagiarised than were outside analysts, according to the report, and not all editors and publishers openly cooperated.
Given the shocking amount of plagiarism you might also expect to see a flurry of retractions, but it’s not so.
Continue reading A tsunami of plagiarism in Serbia, but hardly any retractions
The January 2012 issue of Biosystems Engineering has a commendably thorough retraction notice regarding a case of plagiarism in its pages.
The notice, regarding the article “Advanced techniques for Weed and crop identification for site specific Weed management,” by Karan Singh, K.N. Agrawal, and Ganesh C. Bora, of North Dakota State University, speaks for itself: Continue reading Plagiarism kills weed paper
Several journals in the field of orthopedics and related disciplines have been victimized by an apparent serial plagiarist.
The author, Bernardino Saccomanni, of Gabriele D’ Annunzio University, in Chieti Scalo, Italy—across the boot and up a bit from Rome—appears to have lifted significant amounts of text in several articles.
Last January, for example, Current Reviews in Musculoskeletal Medicine, a Springer title, retracted a 2010 article by Saccomanni, “Painful os intermetatarseum in athletes: a literature review of this condition is presented,” after determining that it plagiarized a 2007 article in the Archives of Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery, also from Springer, with a very similar title, “Painful os intermetatarseum in athletes: report of four cases and review of the literature.”
Osteoporosis International, another Springer publication, has retracted a 2011 paper by Saccomanni titled “Vertebroplasty: an international point of view on this “minimally invasive” surgical technique,” after evidently learning that the point of view wasn’t exactly Saccomanni’s to begin with. Continue reading Multiple retractions as brazen plagiarist victimizes orthopedics literature
In August, we reported on an upcoming retraction of a paper in The Journal of Insect Behavior by Leonardo Gomes, a Brazilian forensic entomologist. At the time, one of the journal’s editors, Thomas Payne, told us that Gomes and his co-authors had been informed that “Dispersal and Burial Behavior in Larvae of Chrysomya megacephala and Chrysomya albiceps (Diptera, Calliphoridae),” would be retracted. Continue reading Retraction of paper by Brazilian entomologist downgraded to an Expression of Concern
The Journal of Materials
Science: Materials in Medicine has retracted a 2011 paper after it was determined that the first author, then a post-doc at the University of Michigan, had plagiarized from another publication.
The first author of the retracted article, “Functionalization of titanium based metallic biomaterials for implant applications,” was the post-doc, Rahul Bhola, who received his PhD from the Colorado School of Mines and went to Michigan to work in the lab of Catherine Krull.
Fruit of that relationship was the paper — and here’s how that worked out: Continue reading Materials paper retracted after post-doc’s plagiarism
About two years ago, Marc Duflot, a research engineer at Cenaero, heard a disturbing tale from a collaborator. The collaborator, it seemed, had been asked to review a paper submitted to a journal, and noticed that it was remarkably similar to a paper by Duflot. Duflot’s collaborator recommended that the journal reject the paper, and it did. Duflot tells Retraction Watch (we added a link to the paper in question):
Then, several months later, I discovered that the…paper had been submitted and accepted in Meccanica. If I remember correctly, I discovered it by searching the web with Google Scholar with terms related to my field of expertise.
So in January 2010, Duflot wrote to the editors of Meccanica to alert them to the plagiarism by the authors, M. Garzon and D. Sargoso of the University of Madrid. He concluded his email:
I am deeply disappointed by the fraudulent behaviour of M. Garzon and D. Sargoso. Strangely, I cannot find any mention of these two people on the web neither of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Madrid. Otherwise, I would have reported this to the head of their department.
An editorial assistant got back to him: Continue reading Ghost authorship? Two Meccanica retractions as an author’s work is plagiarized by disappearing scientists
Today, we have the pleasure of presenting a guest post from Mico Tatalovic, who has just published a piece in the monthly magazine Tehnopolis on retractions in journals in his home country, Croatia. Here, he describes the reporting that went into that feature, which he says was inspired by Retraction Watch.
You may think that in a country with regular plagiarism scandals there would be many retractions. But a search for ‘retractions’ in the open-access depository of academic journals, Hrcak Srce, shows only two retraction notices among more than 70,000 articles in 271 journals indexed there.
There may be several reasons for this. Continue reading How do Croatian scientists deal with retractions and misconduct? A guest post by Mico Tatalovic
The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis is retracting a 2009 article by researchers who seem to have stolen material from a graduate student — and who are fond of studying memories from past lives in other work.
The article, “Norms for the Korean Version of the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A,” was written by Yun Joo Kim and Young Don Pyun, of the eponymous Pyun Neuropsychiatric Clinic, in Seoul, South Korea. The Pyun Clinic specializes in “hypnotherapy for psychiatric illness,” according to its website.
Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading You will not plagiarise. You will not plagiarise. You will not…but if you do, hypnosis journal will retract
The Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery has retracted a 2009 article for plagiarism, but it almost seems like the editors were looking for any excuse to bail out on the troubled paper.
The article, “Conservative management of acute appendicitis,” by two researchers from Kashmir, India, purported to show that antibiotics might be a safe, surgery-sparing approach to appendicitis in some patients. The study has been cited 14 times by other papers, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowedge. It was also cited in a Consumer Reports article as evidence that as many as 10% of patients “get better without treatment” — a curious interpretation of the data.
But in February 2010, a group of surgeons from Bologna, Italy, challenged the Indian authors in a letter to the journal. The authors expressed interest in the concept, which they said had “significant clinical implications,” but took issue with the methodology of the study: Continue reading Can appendicitis be treated with antibiotics? Retraction muddies the waters