Category: math retractions

Author withdraws entire issue after overseeing his own peer review

home_cover-31The editor and author of most of the papers in a special issue of a math journal told us he is withdrawing the entire issue following revelations that he had coordinated the peer-review process.

The articles, published online earlier this year, recently received an expression of concern after the journal realized the guest editor David Gao, at the Federation University Australia, had coordinated the peer-review process. This was a major no-no, since Gao was also an author of 11 of the 13 papers. Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids slated the articles to be peer reviewed again, by reviewers not chosen by Gao.

Gao told us what happened next, from his perspective — he changed his mind about publishing the papers in MMS:

Continue reading Author withdraws entire issue after overseeing his own peer review

“Significant errors in the data” stop Hurricane Isaac paper

1-s2.0-S0169809515X0010X-cov150hThis version of Hurricane Isaac — based on the force of nature that hit Louisiana in 2012 —  didn’t get very far. Atmospheric Research has retracted a paper on a simulation of the hurricane just a few months after it was published.

The paper included two features that commonly get a paper retracted: erroneous data, and a dispute over authorship.

The 2014 paper only has one author: O. Alizadeh-Choobari, a climatologist at the University of Tehran.

Here’s the retraction note, which provides a few more details on what went wrong:

Continue reading “Significant errors in the data” stop Hurricane Isaac paper

Author’s coordination of peer review flags 13 math papers

home_cover (3)Thirteen papers in Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids now have an expression of concern, after it came to light that an author on most of the papers coordinated the peer-review process.

David Y. Gao, a well-known and prolific mathematician at the Federation University Australia, is the author of 11 of the papers, and also the guest editor of the special issue in which they were set to appear. The papers were published online earlier this year.

A spokesperson for SAGE, which publishes the journal, confirmed that the publisher decided to re-review the papers after learning about Gao’s role in the peer-review process:

Continue reading Author’s coordination of peer review flags 13 math papers

1+1 “identical” math papers = retraction

homeHeaderTitleImage_en_USA paper on an equation useful in finance has been retracted after editors discovered an “identical” version had been published in another journal.

The paper, “On the Parametric Interest of the Black-Scholes Equation,” was published in the Thai Journal of Mathematics. According to the introduction, that equation has a practical use:

In financial mathematics, the famous equation named the Black-Scholes equation plays an important role in solving the option price of stocks

(According to The Guardian, it was “The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash.”)

Here’s the retraction note in full:

Continue reading 1+1 “identical” math papers = retraction

Plagiarism count for mathematician updated to four papers

S00220396After we reported on a retraction for a 13-year old paper by Mohammed Aassila, a reader alerted us to two retractions and an editorial notice for the mathematician. Each of the notes is several years old.

That makes a total of four problematic papers for Aassila. Each is plagued by the same thing: plagiarism.

Here is the retraction note for “The influence of nonlocal nonlinearities on the long time behavior of solutions of diffusion problems,” published in the Journal of Differential Equations:

Continue reading Plagiarism count for mathematician updated to four papers

Thirteen-year-old mathematics paper retracted for plagiarism

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A 2002 paper that investigates a kind of equation used to describe physical systems has been “has been detected to be a case of plagiarism.”

Here’s the abstract of the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics (Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Physik) article, “Some blow-up results for a generalized Ginzburg-Landau equation,”

We investigate the blow-up of the solution to a complex Ginzburg-Landau like equation in u coupled with a Poisson equation in ϕ defined on the whole space ℝn, n=1 or 2.

What did this paper plagiarize from?  Continue reading Thirteen-year-old mathematics paper retracted for plagiarism

“Gap in the proof” deletes math paper

BAZThe author of a paper on the properties of a vector space is retracting it from The Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society after a “false application” of a theorem led to a “gap in the proof.”

Here’s the abstract of “On a Weakly Uniformly Rotund Dual of a Banach Space,” in full:

Every Banach space with separable second dual can be equivalently renormed to have weakly uniformly rotund dual. Under certain embedding conditions a Banach space with weakly uniformly rotund dual is reflexive.

And the retraction note, published in the August issue of the journal:

Continue reading “Gap in the proof” deletes math paper

To catch a cheat: Paper improves on stats method that nailed prolific retractor Fujii

anaesthesiaThe author of a 2012 paper in Anaesthesia which offered the statistical equivalent of coffin nails to the case against record-breaking fraudster Yoshitaka Fujii (currently at the top of our leaderboard) has written a new article in which he claims to have improved upon his approach.

As we’ve written previously, John Carlisle, an anesthesiologist in the United Kingdom, analyzed nearly 170 papers by Fujii and found aspects of the reported data to be astronomically improbable. It turns out, however, that he made a mistake that, while not fatal to his initial conclusions, required fixing in a follow-up paper, titled “Calculating the probability of random sampling for continuous variables in submitted or published randomised controlled trials,” also published in Anaesthesia.

According to the abstract:

Continue reading To catch a cheat: Paper improves on stats method that nailed prolific retractor Fujii

Duplication of “a major part of text and results” adds up to third retraction for mathematician

Source: www.ed.gov
Source: www.ed.gov

An article by Alexander Spivak, a mathematician based in Israel, is being retracted from the proceedings of a 2014 numerical analysis meeting because Spivak had already published “a major part of text and results” in a mathematics journal in 2010.

Spivak, a member of the faculty of sciences at Holon Institute of Technology, has a bit of a history with the journal that published his initial 201o paper, the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. That journal retracted two of his papers last year after learning from Zeev Schuss, Spivak’s post-doc supervisor at Tel Aviv University, that those papers contained plagiarized chunks from a paper by Schuss and two colleagues.

Here’s more from the retraction notice for “Successive approximations for optimal control in some nonlinear systems with small parameter”, published in the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Numerical Analysis:

Continue reading Duplication of “a major part of text and results” adds up to third retraction for mathematician

Student denied credit, math article retracted

inequalA math paper in the Journal of Inequalities and Applications has been retracted after it was discovered the authors had included a student’s work without acknowledging her.

One of the authors, however, told us it was an honest mistake, and that the editor pushed for retraction instead of correction “to protect this journal and its impact factor.”

Here’s the notice for “On the Kirchhoff matrix, a new Kirchhoff index and the Kirchhoff energy”: Continue reading Student denied credit, math article retracted