A paper published this October in the journal Frontiers In Neuroscience was retracted the following month because the authors’ collaborators did not give them permission to publish some of the data.
The paper detailed how and why the authors use the software program Nengo to test large simulations of nervous system networks. As part of the research, the authors tested five systems, one of which they were working on with another group. Due to a “miscommunication,” the authors thought they had received permission to publish the data; they plan to resubmit a paper describing the other four systems.
The investigation found that author Jason Jung, a computer engineer at Yeungnam University in Korea, “was involved in submitting the fraudulent review reports” for four of the retracted papers, according to the publisher’s CEO. In the case of the other six, the authors didn’t appear to be involved.
Hindawi Publishing Corporation, which publishes over 400 journals, doesn’t ask authors for potential review suggestions — making a common route to fake peer review more difficult. In July, when Hindawi announced it was investigating the papers, it posted a statement saying that they suspected the editors had created fake reviewer accounts.
The retraction note on Jung’s papers — identical except for the title at the beginning — explains that each paper has
A paper on the quality of computed tomography (CT) images of the human body didn’t stand up to a close examination. It’s been retracted after an investigation found that it plagiarized work from two publications and a poster by another researcher.
The text in the Journal of the Korean Physical Society paperwas taken from work by Kenneth Weiss, a radiologist at the University of Miami, and Jane Weiss, CFO of the couple’s medical imaging company. According to emails that Jane Weiss forwarded to us, Kenneth Weiss brought the plagiarism to light after a PhD student pointed out the similarities between the JKPS paper and one of Weiss’s in the American Journal of Roentgenology. Weiss notified the AJR in January. They started an investigation into the matter, and alerted the JKPS.
A paper on 3-D printing has been pulled because it “inadvertently” included some sensitive material.
We’re not sure which parts of the paper were the specific problem. But the sensitive material may have something with how to improve the surfaces of 3-D printed products, which is the subject of “Feasibility of using Copper(II)Oxide for additive manufacturing.”
Here’s what the paper, published in the International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing contains,according to the abstract:
Additive manufacturing, in spite of its ever wider application range, is still plagued by issues ranging from accuracy to surface finish. In this study, to address the latter issue, the feasibility of using Copper(II)Oxide powder with a polymer binder deposited through a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printing technique is explored.
Did you recently log onto your favorite journal’s website and see this? (For anyone who doesn’t want to bother clicking, it’s the video from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”) If so, your favorite journal was hijacked.
We’re pleased to present a guest post from Michèle B. Nuijten, a PhD student at Tilburg University who helped develop a program called “statcheck,” which automatically spots statistical mistakes in psychology papers, making it significantly easier to find flaws. Nuijten writes about how such a program came about, and its implications for other fields.
Readers of Retraction Watch know that the literature contains way too many errors – to a great extent, as some research suggests, in my field of psychology. And there is evidence that problem is only likely to get worse.
To reliably investigate these claims, we wanted to study reporting inconsistencies at a large scale. However, extracting statistical results from papers and recalculating the p-values is not only very tedious, it also takes a LOT of time.
So we created a program known as “statcheck” to do the checking for us, by automatically extracting statistics from papers and recalculating p-values. Unfortunately, we recently found that our suspicions were correct: Half of the papers in psychology contain at least one statistical reporting inconsistency, and one in eight papers contain an inconsistency that might have affected the statistical conclusion.
A group of computer scientists has a pair of retractions for duplicating “substantial parts” of other articles written by different authors. Both papers, published in Neural Computing and Applications, are on ways to screen for breast cancer more effectively.
According to the abstract of “An improved data mining technique for classification and detection of breast cancer from mammograms,” computers make the process of identifying cancer in lesions detected by mammograms faster and more accurate:
Although general rules for the differentiation between benign and malignant breast lesion exist, only 15–30% of masses referred for surgical biopsy are actually malignant. Physician experience of detecting breast cancer can be assisted by using some computerized feature extraction and classification algorithms. Computer-aided classification system was used to help in diagnosing abnormalities faster than traditional screening program without the drawback attribute to human factors.
The article has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The retraction note reveals where “substantial parts” of the article came from:
A BioMed Central journal has pulled the paper of a scientist who decided to prohibit countries that are friendly to immigrants from using his software.
Recently, German scientist Gangolf Jobb declared that starting on October 1st scientists working in countries that are, in his opinion, too welcoming to immigrants — including Great Britain, France and Germany — could no longer use his Treefinder software, which creates trees showing potential evolutionary relationships between species. He’d already banned its use by U.S. scientists in February, citing the country’s “imperialism.” Last week, BMC Evolutionary Biology pulled the paper describing the software, noting it now “breaches the journal’s editorial policy on software availability.”
A JAMA letter published in April on data breaches accidentally included some data that shouldn’t have been published, either — specifically, “wording and data errors” that affected five sentences and more than 10 entries in a table. One result — a reported increase in breaches over time — also went from statistically significant to “borderline” significant, according to the first author. (So yeah, this post earns our “mega correction” category.)
According to an author, an “older version” of a table made it into the letter, “Data Breaches of Protected Health Information in the United States,” which was corrected in the journal’s June 23/30 issue.
The letter and table in question detail 949 breaches of “unencrypted protected health information.” The letter says the number of breaches has increased from 2010 to 2013; the original article claimed that the P value on that increase was <.001, but the correction says it’s really 0.07. The original says 29.1 million personal records were affected in those breaches; the real number is 29.0. And so on.
