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
Category: plagiarism
Plagiarism and other ‘negligence’ fell lung-estrogen paper
There’s parsing a-plenty in the American Journal of Physiology Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology this month. The journal has retracted a 2010 paper by researchers at Chiba University in Japan, who lifted much of their manuscript from an article by other scientists in a different publication.
The authors of the paper, “The estrogen paradox in pulmonary arterial hypertension,” confess that they misappropriated text. But how they do so is a case study in subtlety: Continue reading Plagiarism and other ‘negligence’ fell lung-estrogen paper
German defense minister Guttenberg resigns after losing his PhD for a plagiarized thesis
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who was stripped of his PhD last week after being found guilty of plagiarizing his law thesis, has resigned his post as Germany’s defense minister. According to Reuters:
“I was always ready to fight but I’ve reached the limit of my powers,” Guttenberg, 39, told journalists in a hastily arranged news briefing at the Defense Ministry in Berlin.
“I informed the chancellor in a very friendly conversation that I’m resigning from political offices and requested to be relieved. It’s the most painful step of my life.”
As we wrote last week, a Bremen University professor first discovered the plagiarism, which was then explored a wiki. The University of Bayreuth took away his doctorate on Wednesday the 23rd.
Alice Bell noted in a comment yesterday Continue reading German defense minister Guttenberg resigns after losing his PhD for a plagiarized thesis
University of Sao Paulo fires professor after a retraction for plagiarism
February has turned out to be a bad month for people found guilty of plagiarism. On Friday, we covered the case of the German foreign defense minister who lost his PhD after his university became aware he had copied passages from newspaper stories into his thesis.
And now we’ve learned that the University of Sao Paolo Paulo (USP) dismissed a full professor earlier this month after an investigation into a study he retracted last year because parts of it had been plagiarized. It has also stripped one of the professor’s former students of her PhD. Continue reading University of Sao Paulo fires professor after a retraction for plagiarism
An unusual retraction: German defense minister zu Guttenberg loses doctorate over plagiarized thesis
When we cover plagiarism on Retraction Watch, particularly when it leads to retractions, we’re writing almost exclusively about science. But there’s a story about a retraction outside of the scientific literature that has been unfolding over the past week, and grabbing enough headlines, that we figured we should post something on it.
It was Bremen University’s Andreas Fischer-Lescano who discovered what he called “a brazen plagiarism” in German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s 2006 law thesis, according to The Guardian. The minister was already a member of parliament at the time, and had apparently used sections of newspaper articles without attribution.
When the allegations first came to light last week, zu Guttenberg denied them. But a university ombudsperson began looking into the matter. And der Spiegel reported that zu Guttenberg Continue reading An unusual retraction: German defense minister zu Guttenberg loses doctorate over plagiarized thesis
Korean ENT journal retracts 17 papers, citing ‘overlap’
The Korean Journal of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery has retracted 17 papers, with the common theme of ‘overlap’ — almost always a euphemism for plagiarism, whether self or otherwise.
Published between 1993 and 2006, the articles came from a group of authors at the department of otolaryngology at Ajou University School of Medicine in Suwon, South Korea. Their topics range from “The Effects of Intratympanic Steroid Injection for the Patients with Refractory Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss” to “Study for Reversibility of Experimental Cholesteatoma Using Mongolian Gerbil.”
The retraction notices all read basically the same way. Here’s the one for the gerbil paper: Continue reading Korean ENT journal retracts 17 papers, citing ‘overlap’
Remote Sensing pulls soil scattering paper lifted from earlier thesis
Remote Sensing has retracted an article whose author decided that a previously published thesis said it best—and decided not mention that inconvenient fact.
The article, “Study of soil scattering coefficients in combination with diesel for a slightly rough surface in the cj band,” was published in late December 2009. The author was Alireza Taravat Najafabadi, a researcher in the department of geoinformatics at the University of Pune. At some point in 2010, the journal received word that the paper likely contained plagiarism.
From the retraction notice, issued earlier this month: Continue reading Remote Sensing pulls soil scattering paper lifted from earlier thesis
ME-Coli: Germ paper retracted after mentor accuses authors of idea theft
Plagiarism can involve the theft of words, and we’ve covered plenty of such cases (like this one). But here’s a case of what appears to be more wholesale lifting of everything from ideas to assays.
The Journal of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology (JMMB), a Karger title, has retracted an October 2010 paper, “Characterization of Methyltransferase Properties of Escherichia coli YabC Protein with an Enzyme-Coupled Colorimetric Assay,” by Jingsong Gu and Chunjiang Ye. Both of those scientists are in the department of biotechnology at the University of Jinan in China.
Gu had trained as a postdoctoral research in the laboratory of biologist Elaine Newman, of Concordia University in Montreal who describes herself as a “long time friend” of E. coli. (As they say, with friends like that, who needs enemas?)
The retraction notice — a trio of remarkably revealing letters — begins with an apologia from the authors: Continue reading ME-Coli: Germ paper retracted after mentor accuses authors of idea theft
Thoracic surgery journal retracts hypertension study marred by troubled data
The Annals of Thoracic Surgery has retracted a 2004 article by a group of Florida researchers who were found by their university to have misrepresented the provenance of their data.
If that construction sounds a trifle precious (er, weasel-y), that’s because the retraction notice does, too: Continue reading Thoracic surgery journal retracts hypertension study marred by troubled data
Nearly identical twins: European Respiratory Journal retracts asthma in pregnancy paper similar to another by same group
The European Respiratory Journal (ERJ) is retracting a paper about whether mothers with asthma are more likely to have poor birth outcomes, after the journal found it overlapped with an earlier paper by the same group. The ERJ paper was published online on June 18, 2010.
The retraction notice said only that Continue reading Nearly identical twins: European Respiratory Journal retracts asthma in pregnancy paper similar to another by same group