A higher-ed journal has retracted a recent paper by a New Jersey scholar who failed to adequately cite one of her sources. Trouble is, the researcher did reference the article more than once — raising the question of whether a retraction, rather than a correction, was the right move. The paper was written by Lynne … Continue reading Remedial math lesson: When does one reference equal an entire paper?
Alan Sokal’s influence has certainly been felt strongly recently. Last month, a critique by Sokal — who in 1996 got a fake paper published in Social Text — and two colleagues forced a correction of a much-ballyhooed psychology paper. A few days after that, we reported on a Serbian Sokal hoax-like paper whose authors cited the scholarly … Continue reading Science reporter spoofs hundreds of open access journals with fake papers
What 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 … Continue reading Double submission leads to retraction of probability paper — and a publishing ban
SpringerPlus has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Saudi mathematicians who lifted text and figures from previously published articles. The paper, “On soft expert topological spaces,” appeared in October 2012. According to the retraction notice:
A pair of engineers at Hohai University in Nanjing, China, has lost their 2012 paper in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. The reason: The article, “Study of the New Leon model for concrete failure,” wasn’t theirs to publish. According to the retraction notice (which is dated September 2013 but has already appeared in … Continue reading Retraction for water researchers who ripped off dissertation
A German professor who claims to have developed “a self-consistent field theory which is used to derive at all known interactions of the potential vortex” will have at least two papers retracted, thanks to the scrutiny of a concerned economist. The first retraction has already appeared, in DNA and Cell Biology, for a paper by … Continue reading “Way out there” paper claiming to merge physics and biology retracted
What do you do when a math paper that contains some “constructions and arguments [that] make no sense mathematically” gets published? If you’re Applied Mathematics Letters, you retract the paper, “For the origin of new geometry.” Here’s the notice:
The International Journal of Nanomedicine is retracting a paper it published in June that appears to contain an impressive amount of misappropriated text and figures. The article, “Particokinetics: computational analysis of the superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles deposition process,” came from a group at the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, in São Paulo, Brazil, led by Walter … Continue reading Journal retracts nanoparticle paper, citing widespread misuse of sources
A mathematician will be performing subtraction on his CV now that he has had to retract a 2011 paper because his co-authors never agreed to submit it with him. Kewen Zhao, of Qiongzhou University, Sanya, China, has lost a paper in Discrete Applied Mathematics, a journal for which Zhao claims to review. (Given the circumstances, … Continue reading Chinese mathematician forced to retract paper after two co-authors say they had nothing to do with work
Have a seat, this one’s a howler. According to a retraction notice for “Computer application in mathematics,” published in Computers & Mathematics with Applications: