Category: physical sciences retractions

Authors pull Science paper on molecular wires for “inappropriate data handling”

pic.mag.current-issueThis week’s issue of Science includes a retraction of a highly cited paper about manipulating the current in a string of molecules with a magnet, after an investigation by the co-authors revealed “inappropriate data handling” by the first author.

According to the note, the co-authors’ suspicions arose when they tried to follow-up on the data. Following a “thorough investigation,” they concluded that first author Rabindra N. Mahato had handled the data in such a way that they could no longer trust the conclusions. In the end, Mahato agreed to the retraction.

Here’s more from the note: Continue reading Authors pull Science paper on molecular wires for “inappropriate data handling”

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homeHeaderTitleImage_en_USA paper on an equation useful in finance has been retracted after editors discovered an “identical” version had been published in another journal.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

50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?

Georg Wittig
Georg Wittig

It’s not often that an article is retracted only to be later proven correct. But that may have happened this past summer in the chemistry literature.

In July, a group of researchers recapitulated an experiment largely similar to one that Nobelist Georg Wittig had performed – and subsequently retracted — decades earlier. Their findings suggest Wittig may actually have gotten it right the first time.

On July 27, Peter Chen of ETH Zurich and colleagues published an article online in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition that describes a new method for appending a carbon atom to an unsaturated hydrocarbon to create a three-membered ring – a useful chemical transformation known as cyclopropanation. Yet, it was not the first time researchers had reported such a process. As Chen and his colleagues note in the Israel Journal of Chemistry, Georg Wittig of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (who would go on to win the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1979) and Volker Franzen reported a similar reaction in 1960 in Angewandte Chemie, a German-language publication. Continue reading 50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?

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

Trouble with data proves toxic for a pair of toxicology papers

logoA pair of papers about the risks of titanium dioxide nanoparticles that share many of the same authors has been retracted from a toxicology journal following an investigation at Soochow University in China.

Particle and Fibre Toxicology is retracting the papers for problems with the statistical methods and missing data, as well as for sharing figures.

Here’s the note for “Intragastric exposure to titanium dioxide nanoparticles induced nephrotoxicity in mice, assessed by physiological and gene expression modifications:”

Continue reading Trouble with data proves toxic for a pair of toxicology papers

“Disagreement about the relative contributions” of authors burns capacitor paper

S02663538A 2014 paper on a component for thin electric circuits has been retracted from Composites Science and Technology due to a “disagreement” over author contributions, according to the retraction note.

The retraction note for “Preparation and dielectric properties of BaTiO3:epoxy nanocomposites for embedded capacitor application” is short and sweet. Here it is, in full:

Continue reading “Disagreement about the relative contributions” of authors burns capacitor paper

“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

Brandeis investigation finds scientific misconduct in gold nanoparticle paper

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A group of authors is retracting a paper from Structure following a Brandeis University investigation that found the first author had fabricated a key result.

Former graduate student Kelsey Anthony was first author of the paper, “High-Affinity Gold Nanoparticle Pin to Label and Localize Histidine-Tagged Protein in Macromolecular Assemblies, which was published online in February 2014. At the time, the Science at Brandeis blog noted: Continue reading Brandeis investigation finds scientific misconduct in gold nanoparticle paper

Images “may not be trustworthy”: Aluminum sheets paper folds into retraction

1-s2.0-S0921509315X00153-cov150hFollowing questions “about the integrity of the microscopy images,” Materials Science and Engineering: A has retracted a paper on the properties of sheets of aluminum under strain.

The images in question show sheets after a few rounds of a process called “constrained groove pressing,” which smushes sheets between two grooved plates, and then between two flat plates, to evaluate how the material holds up.

According to the retraction note for the paper, imaging performed by a third party “may not be trustworthy.”

The paper has been cited 42 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s more from the retraction note to “Nano-structure and mechanical properties of 0–7 strained aluminum by CGP: XRD, TEM and tensile test“:

Continue reading Images “may not be trustworthy”: Aluminum sheets paper folds into retraction