A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.
Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:
Saudi researchers have lost a pair of papers in a spectrometry journal for errors the editors found fatal but the authors apparently dismiss as trivial.
The articles appeared in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The principal author on both papers is Mohammad Gondal, of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dharhan. According to his website, Gondal is a highly decorated physicist, with
Continue reading Two spectrometry papers retracted, one for “intolerable” mistakes. The authors don’t agree.
In May of this year, François-Xavier Coudert, a chemist at PSL University in Paris, had a question about a paper in Chemistry: A European Journal.
Several days later, he had an answer — sort of — along with an apology for readers from Haymo Ross, the journal’s editor in chief.
Continue reading After ten years of being in limbo, a chemistry paper is retracted
Retraction Watch readers who have been following our coverage of retractions by Ali Nazari may have noticed that an anonymous whistleblower was the person who flagged the issues for journals and publishers. That whistleblower uses the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta, and we’re pleased to present a guest post written by him or her.
Something is seriously out of place with the roughly 200 publications by Ali Nazari, a scientist at Swinburne University who studies structural materials. Some of these problems have been known by journals and publishers for years — some since 2012 — yet their response has been mixed. Some have retracted papers. Some have decided not to, so far. And others have been mum.
Continue reading A researcher with 30 retractions and counting: The whistleblower speaks
A researcher at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia will soon add three more retractions to his burgeoning count, making 30.
Ali Nazari has lost 27 papers from several journals, as we’ve reported over the past few months. According to an upcoming notice obtained by Retraction Watch, the International Journal of Material Research (IJMR) will be retracting three more:
Continue reading Materials scientist will soon be up to 30 retractions
God giveth miracles … and it seems she taketh them away as well.
A group of chemists in China has lost a 2018 paper which described a “miraculous” discovery that wasn’t.
The paper was titled “A miraculous chiral Ir–Rh bimetallic nanocatalyst for asymmetric hydrogenation of activated ketones,” and it appeared in Organic Chemistry Frontiers, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The authors, from the State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals at Dalian University of Technology, purported to show that:
Continue reading ‘Miracle’ on ice as chemists pull nanocatalyst paper that fizzled
A chemistry researcher in India is up to seven retractions and one correction for problematic images and other issues.
The researcher, Mahendra Yadav, was the first author on an article titled “Corrosion inhibition of tubing steel during acidization of oil and gas wells,” which appeared in 2013 in the Journal of Petroleum Engineering (JPE). Yadav, who also has a correction for similar concerns, and who has a fairly extensive entry in PubPeer, is listed as being affiliated with the Department of Applied Chemistry at the Indian School of Mines, in Dhanbad.
According to the notice:
Continue reading Chemistry researcher who studies oil wells is up to seven retractions
Apologies in advance for the headache that might come your way after reading this post, but the journal Chaos has a mindbending retraction.
The editors have pulled an article they published in January 2019 over concerns about contaminated peer review and other problems. The paper, “Neglecting nonlocality leads to unrealistic numerical scheme for fractional differential equation: Fake and manipulated results,” was a broadside against an article that had appeared in a different journal.
According to the author, Muhammad Altaf Khan, of the City University of Science and Information Technology in Peshawar, Pakistan:
Continue reading Chaos as Chaos retracts paper it apparently never should have published in the first place
The University of Texas (UT) at Austin does not have the authority to revoke degrees, a Texas judge ruled yesterday in a case involving a chemist whom the university alleges committed misconduct.
UT revoked Suvi Orr’s PhD in 2014, two years after the retraction of a paper that made up part of her thesis because, according to the retraction notice, some of the study was not reproducible. The university told Orr — who earned her PhD in 2008 and is now a researcher at Pfizer — that “scientific misconduct occurred in the production of your dissertation,” according to a letter to Orr from Judith Langlois, senior vice provost and dean of graduate studies.
Orr sued UT, which reversed its decision but then tried to again revoke her degree, at which point she sued again, this time also requesting the university cover her legal expenses. Orr alleges in the suit that she was being used as a “sacrificial lamb” to protect her former advisor, who she said made the errors in the paper. Continue reading University of Texas lacks authority to revoke PhDs, judge rules
The UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry has retracted a 2017 paper in one of its journals after learning that the authors stole the article from other researchers during peer review.
The offending article, “Typical and interstratified arrangements in Zn/Al layered double hydroxides: an experimental and theoretical approach,” appeared in CrystalEngComm, and was written by Priyadarshi Roy Chowdhury and Krishna G. Bhattacharyya, of Gauhati University in Jalukbari.
Well, that’s not really true, is it? The retraction notice lays out the transgression in detail: Continue reading Chem journal yanks paper because authors had stolen it as peer reviewers
