Last week, we brought you the story of Thong Duc Le and his colleagues, physicists who were forced to retract four papers, including one that cited, as we noted “their own study that had already been retracted for plagiarism.”
The team has now retracted three more papers: Continue reading Three more retractions for Vietnamese physicists who plagiarized a plagiarized paper
A group of French researchers liked their paper on the properties of molten tin so much they published it twice. In the same journal. Four months apart.
The article, “Nitrogen spray atomization of molten tin metal: Powder morphology characteristics,” first appeared online in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. That one has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
In May 2007, the same group, sans two authors, published a paper online in the JMPT (and in January 2008 in print) with the identical title. That article — which managed to get cited three times — has now been retracted: Continue reading Mighty molten powder researchers publish paper in journal twice, months apart
Last month, we (and others) reported that the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) had temporarily withdrawn a paper by a former president of the society after a number of chemists pointed out similarities between the March 25 article and previous ones by the author, Ronald Breslow.
The paper had drawn puzzled looks thanks to an April 11 press release — since deleted — headlined “Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?” In its note last month, the journal said: Continue reading JACS makes it official, retracting Breslow “space dinosaurs” paper for “similarity to his previously published reviews”
Sometimes, the full story of scientific misdeeds isn’t clear until several retraction notices appear. Take the case of a group of Vietnamese astrophysicists led by Thong Duc Le.
If you were to read a Physics Letters B retraction notice about one of the group’s papers, “Search for cosmological time variation of the fine-structure constant using low-redshifts of quasar,” you wouldn’t have any idea why the paper was retracted, nor that the move was related to any other retractions: Continue reading Astrophysics retraction trail includes paper that plagiarized another already retracted for…plagiarism
As Stevie Nicks sang in Fleetwood Mac’s hit, “Landslide”:
Well, I’ve been afraid of changing, cause I’ve built my life around you ….
The authors of a 2010 paper in the journal Landslides might have taken those words a little too much to heart. Their manuscript, “Real-time slope water table forecasting by multi-tank model combined with dual ensemble Kalman filter,” purported to be an original paper — but it was really “Second Hand News,” to quote more Fleetwood Mac, the kind that might have “Murrow Turning Over in His Grave.”
According to the notice: Continue reading Fleetwood Mac, anyone? Landslides paper crumbles under weight of “significant originality issue”
Science doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Even vacuum science.
The International Journal of Modern Physics A has retracted a 2011 paper by a physicist who failed to acknowledge the contributions — instrumental, it seems — of his collaborators.
The paper, “Measurement of the Casimir Interaction Between a au Sphere and au Gratings” [au in this case being the atomic symbol for gold, not the French article], was published last summer by Ricardo Decca as part of a conference proceedings. According to the notice: Continue reading Vacuum force researcher retracts paper that failed to name collaborators
Graphene has been hot for several years. Here’s what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had to say about it in 2010 when awarding two researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work:
Graphene is a form of carbon. As a material it is completely new – not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.
But one researcher may have allowed his enthusiasm for graphene to get ahead of him. He and his unwitting co-authors have now lost two papers thanks to that enthusiasm. Continue reading Pair of graphene papers retracted
Duplication has, as we noted on Twitter the other day, been tripping up more and more scientists. And now self-plagiarism has snared a prominent Columbia University chemist in a paper that left many people scratching their heads to begin with.
As reported by the Chembark blog and Nature, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has pulled a paper by Ronald Breslow for alleged duplication. The page for “On Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth,” originally published on March 25, now includes this: Continue reading JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication
Have a seat, this one’s a howler.
According to a retraction notice for “Computer application in mathematics,” published in Computers & Mathematics with Applications: Continue reading Math paper retracted because it “contains no scientific content”
We tend to focus on new retractions here at Retraction Watch, and find it difficult enough to even keep up with the hundreds per year. But sometimes it’s illuminating to take a dip into history, so when Richard van Noorden alerted us to what may be the earliest-ever English language retraction, we thought we’d take a look.
The notice appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on June 24, 1756. It reads: Continue reading The first-ever English language retraction (1756)?