Category: physical sciences retractions

Another math paper retracted because of duplication

Last month, we brought you news of two retractions in math journals for duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship. Last week, we learned that the lead author of one of those papers, Amir Mahmood, has retracted another paper, this one in Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications.

According to the retraction notice, the paper was an “accidental duplication of an article that has already been published” in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation.

The papers share two authors: Mahmood, of the department of mathematics at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology and the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences of GC University, both in Lahore, Pakistan; and N.A. Khan, of the University of Karachi’s math department. Khan was also on one of the two papers we wrote about last month, but not the one Mahmood co-authored. Those two papers’ shared author was M. Jamil.

Mahmood told Retraction Watch by email that the papers are not duplicates, and that the journal editors could not explain to him why they were.

Retraction Watch readers can be the judge. The abstract of the retracted paper: Continue reading Another math paper retracted because of duplication

Another unofficial record? Authors walk back arcane blue crab paper — 15 years later

Portunus trituberculatus, courtesy NOAA

If a paper that has never been cited is retracted, will it be missed?

Japanese researchers have retracted an obscure 1996 article in an equally obscure physics journal after concluding — some 15 years later — that their fundamental assertion was mistaken.

The paper, “Uptake and excretion of cobalt in the crustacean Portunus trituberculatus,” in  Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, purported to show that a form of the element cobalt might be helpful in tracing the growth of Portunus trituberculatus, otherwise known as the blue crab.

That’s the world’s most harvested crab species and a particular favorite in Asia. But don’t confuse it with the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, of William Warner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Beautiful Swimmers.

The problem with such elemental tracers, it seems, is that crabs moult repeatedly, shedding their shells, along with the elements that build up inside them. According to researchers from the Research Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Osaka Prefectural Fisheries Experimental Station, however, a volatile form of cobalt, previously undetected, could be a suitable element for tracing the growth of both crabs and prawns — another important aquaculture species in Asia — over time.

But that turned out to be a (shell)fish tale. Per the retraction notice, which appears in the May 15, 2011 issue of the journal: Continue reading Another unofficial record? Authors walk back arcane blue crab paper — 15 years later

Duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship force retractions of two math papers

Two math journals have recently retracted two papers that share most of their text — and their first author.

The two papers were “Unsteady flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid in a cylindrical domain for a given shear stress,” in Applied Mathematics and Computation, and “A note on longitudinal flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid due to a prescribed shear stress,” in Mathematical and Computer Modelling. The studies were published online last year, but hadn’t made it into a print issue yet.

Both retraction notices, which appeared within the space of a few weeks in late February and early March, say the same thing — that is to say, nothing at all, really:

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy.

So what was wrong with the original reports? Continue reading Duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship force retractions of two math papers

Physics Letters A paper gets retracted twice, but the issues remain “unsettled”

A retraction with a complex and yet unclear narrative appears in the April 25, 2011 issue of Physics Letters A. According to the notice, for “Nuclear spin magnetic resonance force microscopy using slice modulation:”

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors of Physics Letters A because there are unsettled issues on how the research was carried out, how the data were acquired and analyzed. The article was removed from the journal issue before printing although it appeared online. In addition, the article was accidentally published online twice in the same journal.

As the notice suggests, this was actually the second retraction, of the same paper. Here was the first, in 2008, shortly after the paper was published. And here is a removal notice, from later that year. We haven’t come across such an occurrence before, although we’ve been writing Retraction Watch for less than a year.

There are six editors of Physics Letters A, and we tried them all for comment on the “unsettled issues.” A few pointed to Burkhard Fricke, the communicating editor for the paper, who is no longer with the journal. He didn’t respond to requests for more information.

A few referred us to Karine van Wetering, a publisher at Elsevier: Continue reading Physics Letters A paper gets retracted twice, but the issues remain “unsettled”

Stanford group retracts JACS paper, but revisits and validates findings

A prominent Stanford University chemistry lab has been forced to retract a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). According to the retraction notice:

Due to inconsistencies between some of the assigned structures and the experimental data that appear in the paper, the authors retract this publication. We regret very much this unfortunate occurrence.

The Retraction Watch tipster who alerted us to this retraction explained what the original paper reported: Continue reading Stanford group retracts JACS paper, but revisits and validates findings

Elsevier weighs in on Brazilian fraud case

Yesterday, we reported on 11 retractions in various Elsevier chemistry journals of papers from a group of Brazilian scientists who are alleged to have fabricated nuclear magnetic resonance images used in their articles.

We’d spoken with the senior author on those papers, Claudio Airoldi, who defended himself and his colleagues and denied that the NMR images had been manipulated.

Today, we heard from Tom Reller, vice president for global corporate relations at Elsevier, who offered a different version of events.

Here’s what Reller had to say, straight from his email: Continue reading Elsevier weighs in on Brazilian fraud case

Hazardous materials: Elsevier retracts 11 chemistry papers from Brazilian group, citing fraud

The publisher Elsevier has announced that it is retracting 11 papers from a team of Brazilian researchers over concerns that the scientists committed fraud in the studies.

The notice is pegged to an October 2009 article in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science titled “Immobilization of 5-amino-1,3,4-thiadiazole-thiol onto kanemite for thorium(IV) removal: Thermodynamics and equilibrium study” by Denis L. Guerra, Marcos A. Carvalho, Victor L. Leidens, Alane A. Pinto, Rúbia R. Viana, and Claudio Airoldi.

According to the notice: Continue reading Hazardous materials: Elsevier retracts 11 chemistry papers from Brazilian group, citing fraud

Sigh: “The purpose of keeping these retraction notices slim is not to produce too much detail”

Regular readers of this blog by now know that one of our goals is to make retractions as open and informative as possible. Which is why when they’re not, we get irritated that not everyone seems to agree.

Consider the editors of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry, which this month has retracted two papers from a group of researchers in Iran. The articles were titled “Determination of the electrode potentials for substituted 1,2-dihydroxybenzenes in aqueous solution: Theory and experiment” first published online in July 2006 and cited 25 times, according to the Thomson Scientific Web of Knowledge, and “Calculation of electrode potentials of 5-(1,3-dioxo-2-phenyl-indan-2-yl)-2,3-dihydroxy-benzoic acid, molecular structure and vibrational spectra: A combined experimental and computational study,” which appeared in December 2006. (Both articles were published in the journal’s previous incarnation as the Journal of  Molecular Structure: THEOCHEM.)

The reason given in each case  is the same — and tantalizingly cryptic: Continue reading Sigh: “The purpose of keeping these retraction notices slim is not to produce too much detail”

More on Applied Mathematics Letters: Journal retracted paper questioning second law of thermodynamics

Have you read yesterday’s post on a retraction in Applied Mathematics Letters yet? (If you haven’t, you’ve missed the explanation of how “Both science and spirituality came from space,” along with other oddities. We’ll wait while you go read it.) But for those of you who have, it turns out that this wasn’t the first retraction of a bizarre paper in the journal this year.

In January, Granville Sewell, of the University of Texas, El Paso’s math department, published a paper there called “A Second Look at The Second Law.” Its abstract: Continue reading More on Applied Mathematics Letters: Journal retracted paper questioning second law of thermodynamics

Faked data, unsubstantiated claims, and spirituality add up to a math journal retraction

Sometimes, things just don’t add up. Take this retraction notice, from the March 2011 issue of Applied Mathematics Letters:

This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have falsified mathematical findings and have made unsubstantiated claims regarding Euclid’s parallel postulate (Appl. Math. Lett. 23 (2010) 1137–1139. doi:10.1016/j.aml.2010.05.003). This article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

There’s actually only one author, an M. Sivasubramanian, of Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology, Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, India, but we’re not PhDs in math, so we figured we were missing something important. Fortunately, Ben Steinberg, a high school friend of one of ours — Ivan’s — is a bit of a math rock star and a professor at Carleton University. We asked him for his take:

I am not sure which is more amusing, the article or the retraction. I cannot understand how this could possibly be published anywhere. It seems like a practical joke to test whether articles are actually refereed. Not a single statement in the author’s “proof” makes sense. Continue reading Faked data, unsubstantiated claims, and spirituality add up to a math journal retraction