Ever wonder how editors figure out whether a paper should be corrected, retracted, or left as-is? For a window into that crucial decision-making process, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) publishes a number of anonymized cases per year, in which they weigh in on a dilemma faced by a journal editor. The organization has weighed … Continue reading What happens before a retraction? A behind-the-scenes look from COPE
We’ve seen many cases of researchers creating fake email addresses to impersonate reviewers that usher their paper to publication. But in the latest fake email incident, a journal is retracting a paper on liver cancer after the first author created a phony address for the last and corresponding author. Both are researchers at Zhengzhou University in China. This … Continue reading Fake email address — for author, not reviewer — fells another paper
We’re sharing a relatively old retraction notice with you today, because it’s of a nature we don’t often see: A chemist apparently stole text from a manuscript he was reviewing. In spring of 2009, Yi-Chou Tsai, a chemist at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, was reviewing a paper for Nature Chemistry. At the time, he’d … Continue reading “I am really sorry:” Peer reviewer stole text for own paper
The editor of Desalination has retracted a paper that plagiarized from another article published in the same journal six years earlier. The papers describe desalination systems, of course. This retraction happened on a relatively quick timeline: The paper, “An integrated optimization model and application of MEE-TVC desalination system,” was published online in June, and pulled in January. Here’s … Continue reading Desalination journal let a plagiarized paper — from the same journal — through its filter
There’s a new paper about retractions, and it’s chock-full of the kind of data that we love to geek out on. Enjoy. The new paper, “A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact,” appears on the preprint server arXiv — meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed — and is co-authored … Continue reading Ready to geek out on retraction data? Read this new preprint
The week at Retraction Watch was dominated by the retraction of “the Creator” paper, but we also reported on a scientist under investigation losing a grant, and a case brewing at a New Jersey university. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
We have learned that Nic Cavell, who was dismissed last week from WIRED for plagiarizing in several stories for the publication’s website, was fired from another publication for missing deadlines. Before Cavell was selected to be a 2016 reporting fellow at WIRED magazine — a paid six-month position for promising young reporters — he wrote on the crime beat for The Riverdale Press, a … Continue reading Reporter fired by WIRED had been dismissed by newspaper for missing deadlines
A paper about combating cyberterrorism is coming under fire after allegations of plagiarism sparked on social media. Soon after the paper was published by the journal Computer Technology and Application in 2015, Orgnet LLC, a network analysis software company, announced on Twitter that the paper took content from its webpage. The firm tweeted:
Last Friday, WIRED editor Adam Rogers got a direct message on Twitter that no journalist wants to see. Christina Larson, a freelance writer in China, told him she had seen overlap with her own work in a few WIRED stories, and included links to the relevant pieces. “She was gracious, just asking for a link … Continue reading “That was a really bad Friday for us:” WIRED warns four stories were plagiarized
A BMC journal has added an expression of concern to a paper on firefly genes after a University of Queensland investigation determined a table should be credited to a different source. According to a representative of the university, the investigation found no evidence of misconduct. The university submitted an erratum that the journal chose not … Continue reading Firefly paper flagged following Queensland investigation