A leading chemist at the University of Washington, Larry Dalton, has retracted a 2004 study in Inorganica Chimica Acta, marking his second retraction in the journal in 47 years.
Here’s the new notice: Continue reading Leading chemist notches two retractions in one journal, separated by 47 years
It is often said that science is self-correcting, but it is usually more accurate to add “in the long run” to that statement.
Take, for example, this retraction of a 10-year-old paper in Entropy that had been questioned since 2005. Here’s the notice for “Statistical Convergent Topological Sequence Entropy Maps of the Circle:”
The editors were made aware that a paper published in Entropy in 2004 [1] may have plagiarized an earlier paper by Roman Hric published in 2000 [2]. After checking with specialized plagiarism software, we found that this claim is indeed correct and almost the entire paper is a verbatim copy of the earlier one. After confirmation of this fact, the editors of Entropy have decided to retract the paper immediately.
We would like to apologize to the readers of the journal that it took so many years to notice this error and to retract the paper. Apparently there is a comment on MathSciNet (http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/) since 2005 that points out this case of possible plagiarism [3], however the editorial office was not aware of this until recently. We request readers of the journal to directly get in touch with the editorial office and the editors of the journal for similar cases in the future, so that they can be handled promptly.
References
1. Aydin, B. Statistical Convergent Topological Sequence Entropy Maps of the Circle. Entropy 2004, 6, 257–261.
2. Hric, R. Topological sequence entropy for maps of the circle. Comment. Math. Univ. Carolin. 2000, 41, 53–59.
3. MathSciNet, MR2082710 (2005f:37075), http://www.ams.org/mathscinet getitem?mr=2082710
The paper has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Hat tip: William T.A. Harrison
An article in New Space, a journal about space travel, has been retracted because the results it presented weren’t ready for liftoff.
The retraction notice appears as a letter from editor G. Scott Hubbard: Continue reading Failure to launch: “Inaccuracies,” “incomplete and incorrect references” ground space tourist paper
Forgive us for revisiting our family traditions, but the story of Hanukkah tells how the Maccabees managed to coax eight days worth of light from a day’s worth of olive oil. Some Tunisian chemists are probably wishing their paper on olive oil had the same staying power.
But their 2013 article, in the Journal of Oleo Science — a publication of the Japanese Oil Chemists’ Society — has been retracted because the group evidently wasn’t much of a group after all.
The paper, “Effect of Storage on Refined Olive Oil Composition: Stabilization by Addition of Chlorophyll Pigments and Squalene,” purported to come from Ghayth Rigane, Mohamed Bouaziz, Sami Sayadi and Ridha Ben Salem, who work in Tunisia and have published together before on more than one occasion. As the abstract states: Continue reading Hanukkah it ain’t: Oil paper burns out as authors bicker
Denis de Jesus Lima Guerra, a co-author on 11 chemistry papers that were retracted in 2011 for suspicions of fraud, has lost his position at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT).
Bernardo Esteves, who was first to report the news, writes (courtesy Google Translate) that the dismissal was Continue reading Brazilian researcher on 11 retracted papers loses academic post
The journal Bioinformation has retracted a 2009 article by a group of researchers from India.
The paper was titled “Targeting pseudoknots in H5N1 hemagglutinin using designed aptamers,” and was written by Priyanka Dhar, Sayak Ganguli and Abhijit Datta, of the Defence Institute of High Altitude Research and the Bioinformatics Centre at Presidency College in Kolkata.
Under a heading, “Reader Feedback”, the retraction notice states: Continue reading ‘Pseudoknots’ a pseudopaper, retracted for plagiarism
The Journal of Asian Earth Sciences has retracted a 2004 article by a scholar in India who resused text from a previous work on which he was a co-author.
The article, “Finite strain and deformation from a refolded region of the Dudatoli-Almora Crystalline, Kumaun Lesser Himalaya,” was written by Hari B. Srivastava, of Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. Here’s what it had to say: Continue reading Paper on refolded mountain range a reproduction, now retracted
A team of physicists has lost their 2013 paper in the Journal of Optics after the publisher learned that the article had already appeared in print twice before.
The article, “Inscription of narrow bandwidth Bragg gratings in polymer optical fibers,” came from researchers at the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, in Portugal, and the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies, in Birmingham, England. Per the abstract: Continue reading Seeing triple: Optics paper proves to be one of three, retracted
A group of researchers have lost a paper in a computer science journal because they were apparently using its references to help the impact factor of a different journal that one of them edits.
Here’s the notice for “Impacts of sensor node distributions on coverage in sensor networks,” a paper first published in 2011 and cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge: Continue reading Citation manipulation: Journal retracts paper because author boosted references to a journal he edits
On Saturday, we highlighted a great two-part series by Joseph Neff of the News & Observer diving into the story of “Stefan Franzen, a chemistry professor at North Carolina State University who has been trying unsuccessfully to correct the scientific record.” Today, that series became a three-part series, with a new story revealing that an investigation by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) had found “reckless” falsification in the work in question.
One of the key papers in the controversy was published by Lina A. Gugliotti, Daniel L. Feldheim, and Bruce E. Eaton in Science in 2004 and cited 125 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. (Eaton is now at the University of Colorado at Boulder.) In 2011, Nature reported on the situation: Continue reading Science hasn’t retracted paper that university, NSF investigators wanted withdrawn