If the facility you need to reproduce your experiments closes after you’ve discovered questions about your original findings, what do you do?
If you’re a group of physicists that published a 2006 paper in Science, “Desorption of H from Si(111) by Resonant Excitation of the Si-H Vibrational Stretch Mode,” you retract your study. Here’s the notice, from today’s Science: Continue reading Physics paper in Science retracted after Vanderbilt facility closes
The authors of a 2008 paper alleging to have described how a particular protein binds to the parathyroid hormone have retracted it. The paper, “Structure of the Parathyroid Hormone Receptor C Terminus Bound to the G-Protein Dimer Gβ1
2,” has been cited 12 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. According to the notice: Continue reading Ties that don’t bind: Group retracts parathyroid hormone crystallography paper
One of the authors of a paper in Physical Review Letters has withdrawn it, after someone pointed out an error.
The paper, “Coulomb Forces on DNA Polymers in Charged Fluidic Nanoslits,” was written by Brown University’s Derek Stein and one of his graduate students, Yongqiang Ren. It was published in February of this year, and the retraction ran on July 20.
The notice is forthright: Continue reading A quick Physical Review Letters retraction after author realizes analysis was “performed incorrectly”
A group of Turkish researchers has retracted a paper purporting to show a method of calculating the thermodynamic properties of certain transition metals, because it was plagiarized from another article. The withdrawn paper, “A simple analytical EAM model for some bcc metals,” was published in 2010 in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation.
Here’s the notice (we added a link to the plagiarized paper): Continue reading Plagiarism forces retraction of mathematical modeling paper
There was a curious retraction published online last month in Physica Scripta, an Institute of Physics journal. The notice, for “Response of Cu 0.5 (Tl 0.5-y Hg y)Ba 2 Ca 3 Zn 2 Cu 2 O 12-δ (y =0, 0.15, 0.25 and 0.35) superconductors in electric and magnetic fields,” reads as follows: Continue reading Physics paper retracted “on ethical grounds” — aka the data had already been published
Applied Mathematics Letters, which agreed to apologize to Intelligent Design-friendly Texas professor Granville Sewell and have its publisher, Elsevier, pay $10,000 in legal fees, has posted the text of its apology (Of note: Elsevier has the apology behind a paywall. So if 318 people fork over the $31.50 fee, they’ll have their $10,000 back.): Continue reading Applied Mathematics Letters posts apology for retracting Intelligent Design-friendly paper
The journal Geology has retracted a paper that, when it was published in May 2010, was hailed as a major step forward in understanding what happened when the Indian and Asian land masses collided millions of years ago. As The Hindu reported when the paper was first published:
Dr. [Anju] Pandey and her colleagues used sophisticated analytical techniques to demonstrate the occurrence of relict majorite, a variety of mineral garnet, in rocks collected from the Himalayas. Majorite is stable only under ultra-high pressure conditions, meaning that it must have been formed very deep down in the Earth’s crust, before surfacing millions of years later.
“Our findings are significant because researchers have disagreed about the depth of subduction of the Indian plate beneath Asia,” said Dr. Pandey.
In fact, the previous depth estimates conflicted with estimates based on computer models. The new results suggest that the leading edge of the Indian plate sank to a depth around double that of previous estimates.
“Our results are backed up by computer modelling and will radically improve our understanding of the subduction of the Indian continental crust beneath the Himalayas,” said Pandey, according to an NOC release.
It turns out, however, that as best as anyone can tell, the key data are from Norway, not the Himalayas, and were published in 1998 by another group. According to the retraction notice, which appears in the May 2011 issue (link to 1998 paper added): Continue reading Geology retraction unearths a dead co-author and plagiarized image of “Himalayan” rock actually from Norway
Elsevier, the publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters, which retracted a paper questioning the second law of thermodynamics earlier this year, will issue an apology and pay $10,000 in legal fees.
According to John West at the Discovery Institute’s blog, which broke the story: Continue reading Elsevier apologizes for Applied Mathematics Letters retraction, pays author’s legal fees
We have an update to our coverage of the retractions involving papers from a group of researchers in Iran that were published in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (formerly called the Journal of Molecular Structure: THEOCHEM)
Although we have not received a response from the first author of those studies, Siavash Riahi, one author, Mohammad Reza Ganjali, of the Center of Excellence in Electrochemistry at the University of Tehran, sent us a lengthy comment recently. We post his remarks in their entirety here, unedited: Continue reading Chemist: “corresponding author should answer” questions regarding retracted papers
Back in March, we reported that the journal Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (CTC) had retracted a pair of 2006 papers by a group of Iranian researchers. As the notices stated, the scientists had recalled their articles after detecting “serious errors” with the work post-publication.
At the time, the authors still had three other articles in good standing with CTC. No longer.
CTC has retracted the remaining three papers by the group, for the same “serious errors.” The articles appeared between 2007 and 2009, and were titled: Continue reading Three more chemistry papers fall to “serious errors” of unknown nature