“Clear case of plagiarism” forces retraction of chemistry paper

jrnlchemscieThe Journal of Chemical Sciences,  the journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences, has retracted a 2012 paper by a group of researchers in India and South Korea who stole material (and a lot of it) from a 2009 article for their reactant.

The retraction notice (it’s a pdf) speaks quite well for itself:

Continue reading “Clear case of plagiarism” forces retraction of chemistry paper

Our bad! Researchers take colleagues’ data, lose paper

aamick_v005i012.inddA pair of chemists from China who published their colleagues’ data without knowledge or permission have lost the article to retraction. They also have another retraction on a similar topic, which we covered before.

The article, which appeared in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces in 2012,  was titled “Nanoporous PtCo Surface Alloy Architecture with Enhanced Properties for Methanol Electrooxidation.” The authors, Huajun Qiu and Feixue Zou, are listed as being with the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Shandong University, in Jinan, China.

As the retraction notice states: Continue reading Our bad! Researchers take colleagues’ data, lose paper

Gravity paper yanked for plagiarism by another name

jtapcoverThe Journal of Theoretical and Applied Physics has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Iranian cosmologists who failed to adequately cite one of the critical references on which they based their work.

We think that falls under the broader category of plagiarism — after all, as Heisenberg famously postulated, the same text cannot simultaneously appear in two published articles under different authorship. Or something like that.

The paper in question, “Torsion of space-time in f (R) gravity,” deals with, as this Wikipedia entry states: Continue reading Gravity paper yanked for plagiarism by another name

“Soft biometrics” for human ID paper guilty of identity theft, retracted

ausjrforensciThe Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences has retracted a paper it published earlier this year on the use of facial biometrics to identify humans.

The reason: Evidently, those biometrics had already largely been described by another group.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading “Soft biometrics” for human ID paper guilty of identity theft, retracted

We know why the caged dimers sing: They’re being retracted

jacsat_v135i024.inddHere’s a good example of a retraction done the right way (we think).

The Journal of the American Chemical Society has retracted — at the behest of the principal investigator  — a 2008 article by a group of researchers whose subsequent studies undermined their confidence in the validity of their initial findings.

The article was titled “Cooperative melting in caged dimers of rigid small molecule DNA-hybrids,” and it came from the lab of SonBinh Nguyen, of Northwestern University. As the paper’s abstract stated:
Continue reading We know why the caged dimers sing: They’re being retracted

Double submission leads to retraction of probability paper — and a publishing ban

jtbWhat are the chances of successfully duplicating publication in the Journal of Theoretical Probability? Not too high, it seems.

A pair of South Korean authors have gotten a five-year ban from the journal for double-publishing a paper in the math literature.

The article, “Convergence of Weighted Sums for Arrays of Negatively Dependent Random Variables and Its Applications,” was written by Jong-Il Baek and Sung-Tae Park of Wonkwang University in IkSan.

According to the retraction notice: Continue reading Double submission leads to retraction of probability paper — and a publishing ban

Journal retracts paper for plagiarism, but mathematician author doesn’t agree

jmathphysThe Journal of Mathematical Physics has retracted a paper by a prolific mathematician in Turkey who doesn’t agree that he plagiarized.

Here’s the notice, for “Homotopy perturbation method to obtain exact special solutions with solitary patterns for Boussinesq-like B(m,n) equations with fully nonlinear dispersion:” Continue reading Journal retracts paper for plagiarism, but mathematician author doesn’t agree

Paper on partially entangled states retracted for partially entangling authors

phys rev aA paper on partially entangled states seems to have fallen victim to a confusing entanglement of authors and studies.

Here’s the notice for the paper, “Optimal quantum communication using multiparticle partially entangled states,” by Atul Kumar, Satyabrata Adhikari, Subhashish Banerjee, and Sovik Roy: Continue reading Paper on partially entangled states retracted for partially entangling authors

Mislabeled sample leads to a chain reaction of physics retractions

physrevbTwo different teams of physicists have retracted papers from Physical Review B after realizing that a sample used in the paper published first — and which formed the basis of the second paper — was mislabeled.

Here’s the notice for the first paper, “s-wave superconductivity in barium-doped phenanthrene as revealed by specific-heat measurements,” by Jianjun Ying of the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, and colleagues: Continue reading Mislabeled sample leads to a chain reaction of physics retractions

Double-dipping leads to removal of petroleum research paper

pst journalcoverIranian scientists have lost one of two articles they submitted — and published — simultaneously to different journals. Watch as confusion ensues.

The retracted paper, “Permeability Estimation of a Reservoir Based on Neural Networks Coupled with Genetic Algorithms,” appeared online in August 2011  in Petroleum Science and Technology, a Taylor & Francis journal. According to the liner notes, the paper had been received on January 15, 2010 and accepted a few weeks later. It has been cited once since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, by its authors, in a paper published in the same journal.

Meanwhile, in August 2011 the authors (minus one name) also published “Evolving neural network using real coded genetic algorithm for permeability estimation of the reservoir,”  in Expert Systems With Applications, an Elsevier title.

The standing paper — which has been cited seven times — now carries the following erratum notice (dated far into the future, September 2013): Continue reading Double-dipping leads to removal of petroleum research paper